UNITED STATES—Can you believe spending four years at a university studying your tale off, to learn that you might come out of school and not have a job? Trust me I know the feeling. A college degree is like a high school diploma nowadays. If you want to stand out against the rest, you have to have a graduate degree or a doctorate degree to be considered a top-notch candidate.
The experience really has nothing to do with anything, as long as you have the degree its the deciding factor, but there are also other issues prevalent. How can we expect to get a job if we don’t have experience? Every company wants you to have experience, yet there are no companies willing to hire people and train them. Trying to find a job in today’s economy is like picking a needle from a haystack. Quality jobs are out there, its just so many companies are overly choosy about who they bring on board.
Internships are a great way to gain experience in the work force, but internships are also limited in scope. So many college students that intern for companies rarely learn any new skills or job experience. They may spend countless hours playing errand runner to the boss. How exactly is grabbing everyone’s lunch or sorting mail preparing you for the real world?
Its not, it may teach you discipline, but it’s more about the hierarchy of command. Those on top do little to nothing, while everyone else busts their tails. If a company is really focused on getting the best out of interns brought on board, the goal should be to disperse them into the department or departments they are most interested in.
This provides the student with the opportunity to take on responsibility and learn a new skill that they may be quite good at that they never thought out. Having that internship on your resume gives you an edge, but there is still the issue that you have no real world experience. An internship is not the same as an actual job, interns rarely get dismissed, but in corporateAmericaif you don’t do your job, someone who can will replace you. So many students fail to understand this.
CorporateAmericahas to be a bit more inviting to training potential candidates for a certain job, not everyone is going to have 5-7 years of experience in a particular field. By the way, this is what most companies ask for when seeking out suitors for a job vacancy. Having a mentor show them the ropes places an employee in a better position, of course there is an issue of a costly mistake being made, but no one is perfect, mistakes happen the key is to learn from those mistakes and keep it moving.
Look at it this way, by training someone to perform a certain duty that person picks up a skill that can help the company invite an influx of applicants that can be trained by the same person. In a sense, the company is able to select from a group of candidates to perform a task compared to just one person. Why is this important? People change careers all the time, if a company loses its top producer and has no one else to fill that void it can be distracting and perhaps costly for the corporation. Having a back-up prevents such issues from arising.
No individual comes into a company as an expert; it takes time to learn a skill or to perfect your craft. To all the companies out there, don’t be so quick to slam the door in an inexperienced candidates face. That person could be the key to taking your company to the next level, but you’ll never know because you didn’t give them the shot to prove themselves to you.
By Trevor Roberts