Shall We Count Internships as Work Experience?

When taking the baby steps of your professional life, you could be faced with the question ‘do internships count as work experience?’. It might have been not something that you were forced to do as a student and not enjoyed doing, yet the fact is entry-level candidates enjoy huge advantages when they list their internships as work experience.

Almost universally, recruiters have accepted it because they can derive some form of understanding about these applicants, fresh out of college, through their internships. But the issue of concern here is whether that internship was a mere training or a real-time job. Irrespective of the fact that you were paid or not, it counts as work experience when you were intricately involved in the process you worked in.

The relevance of the internship to the current job description plays a determinant role in bagging a job. If you have done a job that does not have a relation to the place you have presently applied in, then there are chances the employer will not consider it as work experience. But as every cloud has a silver lining, here too you could expect some recruiter who values experience over everything else. At least you got to experience some kind of work culture and how to interact as a member of a team. After all, an experience is an experience, right? So, rest assured in considering internships as work experience.

To do or not to do – include the internship in a resume that is; if you too are in this dilemma then here is the help. If you think that you already have a lot of more relevant other experiences to list on your resume, then you can leave this out. However, if you are an entry-level candidate, this could be your only way of drawing a recruiter’s attention to your resume and make you stand out among all the other applicants. Again even if the work that you did as an intern is not directly associated with the current job offer, yet you have made remarkable achievements there, it is not something you should leave out of your resume. You could transfer that skill you learned into something more fruitful at this new workplace for all you know!

So, here are the things that you really need to talk about when you put down your internships as work experience.

1. Lay emphasis on what you achieved as an intern
2. Talk about the value you added to the company in the role that you were interning as – using numbers is the key
3. Learn to identify valuable internships and always place it at the top of the experience list, especially if you an entry-level applicant.
4. Give it the same treatment as any other job experience by clearly mentioning the name of the organisation, the dates from when and to when you served as an intern, and the role that you were assigned

Thus, now you know, the next time anyone asks you ‘do internships count as work experience?’, the answer is always ‘YES’.