Getting and Succeeding in an Internship

For better or worse, an internship is increasingly a prerequisite to getting hired. 

Plus, a good internship can provide real-world learning experience that will make you more confident and competent as a professional and, at minimum, reduce the Imposter Syndrome that’s pervasive among new graduates who feel longer on theoretical than practical learning.

My PsychologyToday.com article today aims to help you or someone you care about to land an appropriate internship and how to make the most of it

Converting an Internship or Volunteer "Opportunity" into Paid Work

To avoid having to pay, give benefits and legal rights, many employers use interns and volunteers.

Equally sad for job seekers, too few of those no-pay "opportunities" get converted into paid work. Often, it's use up the free labor until they quit, whereupon the employer finds a new freebie. That’s particularly likely in sexy fields, for example, fashion, sports, entertainment, and the environment.

My PsychologyToday.com article today offers ways to boost the chances of converting an internship or volunteer gig into paid work.

"I Want to Work in the Non-Profit Sector?"

A caller to my radio program had only for-profit experience and wants to move into the nonprofit sector. Worse, she's been out of the paid workforce for years. 

As my PsychologyToday.com contribution today, I post the edited transcript of our exchange.

Converting Part-Time, Temp, Internship, or Contract Work into a Full-Time Job

My AOL article today: How to Convert a Part-Time Job into a Full-Time One.  The content is also relevant to people in internships and in contract work who'd like a full-time, more permanent position.

Also today, I discussed, live, in an AOL.com "Lunchtime Live" video how America might best address the fact that an ever larger percentage of jobs are part-time, temp, etc.

Career Advice for Students Starting Their Last Year of School

My USNews.com article today: career advice for students in their last year of school.

It presents ideas on how to choose courses and extracurriculars with an eye to career and how to make the most of each.

When to Work for Free

My article on AOL today: When to work for free.

I'll Be on KGO Radio's Ronn Owens Program

If you'd like some free career or education advice, I'll be on the Ronn Owens Show, one of the West Coast's most listened-to shows, tomorrow, Tues, Apr 5, 10:07 am-11 am Pacific time on KGO (810 on the AM dial in San Francisco.)

In addition to offering advice to callers, the host will likely ask me about under-the-radar careers I'm bullish about, little-known but effective strategies for landing a job in a tough market, how to choose a college, and how to line up a good internship.

Some Favorite Career and Life Tips

In preparing for a radio show, I've reviewed hundreds of my previously dispensed career and life tips. Here are some I'd like to highlight for you:

LIFE TIPS
When your child errs, express disappointment, then ask the child "What should we do?" Only if those too rarely work, use rewards and/or punishment, but never corporal punishment--that only teaches the child that violence is an appropriate response.

Is Facebook worth your time?

If you wonder why someone gets so much more done than you do, ask if you might shadow him/or her for a few hours.

On the continuum from parasite to host, where are you? Want to change?

Losers think, "What's the least amount of work I can get away with?" Winners think, "How can I get as much done as possible?"

My oft-repeated favorite tip: When I asked my dad, a Holocaust survivor, why he rarely talks about the Holocaust, he said, "The Nazis took five years from my life. I won’t give them one minute more. Martin, never look back; always look forward.” We’ve all had bad things happen to us but nearly all the successful people I know refuse to wallow. They always ask themselves, “What’s the next positive step I can take?”

SUCCESS ON THE JOB
Leadership is making time when there's no time.

In meetings, sit in The Focus Spot: where the person you most want to impress usually looks, usually a bit left or right of straight-ahead.

Even my highest-level clients (e.g., Fortune 50 C-level execs, physicians, big-time lawyers) so appreciate praise.

The most important thing a good manager does is take the time to recruit the bright and intrinsically motivated.

To motivate your supervisees, inspire and praise more than use money and formal evaluations.

Anchor your talk's core ideas with a compelling story and memorable visual. That will up your talk's chances of staying in the audience's brain and thus of changing their behavior.

Judd Apatow: "I am always driven by the terror of humiliation. My shrink calls it unhealthy but she can't argue with its effectiveness."

RUNNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS
Don't innovate; replicate. Find a successful business and copy it. For example, I'd find some busy food trucks and incorporate their best features into mine, of course, placing mine in a great location.

Some low-risk business ideas:

• Clean out people's garages and basements. Once you have the system down, hire and train others to do the work. You build the business.
• Buy an apartment building that has been ruined by the tenants. Rehab it and sell it.
• Plant and remove "For Sale" signs for Realtors. Again, once you've learned how to do it well, hire others to do the work. You build the business.
  

Key to being successfully self-employed: Be cheap, for example, "How can I get space for free--How about a friend's apartment that's empty during the day?"

FINDING A CAREER
Ask yourself, "Is it worth trying to change the world, with results unlikely and/or invisible, or be, for example, a haircutter, where you constantly see positive results of your efforts?

In choosing a career, if you want to consider the job market, don't focus on what's hot. A better question is, "What's the supply/demand ratio of job seekers in this field?" For example, solar engineering is hotter than petroleum engineering but far fewer people aspire to the latter, so it may be easier to find jobs in that field.

A photographer client of mine said, "I’m worn out on 'follow your passion.' I crave a plain ol' good job." Career contentment mainly comes from within your personality, plus whether you have a decent boss, coworkers, an ethical workplace, a workload that's moderate in difficulty and quantity, a reasonable commute, decent pay, and job security. It's usually easier to find those in a non-sexy job because competition for such jobs is less fierce.

LANDING A JOB
If I were homeless and wanted to launch a good career, especially if I was trying to get by on soft skills, I'd be a salesperson in a busy retail establishment in an upscale area and schmooze customers.

Today, unless you have an A+ job history or superstrong connections, your job hunt must be A+. From initial query to final negotiation, all need be ahead-of-the-pack.

Interview target employers for an article you're writing for a trade/professional publication or for your own Internet radio show/podcast. Those are easier to pull off than you may think and will give you access to top-quality employers as well as boost your career credentials.

How to work a conference or trade show: Be a presenter or at least a volunteer. The exhibit area trumps sessions: you get access to lots of top people; session content can usually be acquired on the Net. If you want to talk with a session presenter, be last in line. Walk the presenter to his car or invite her for coffee or a meal. Wine & cheese mixers trump other recreations.

How to prepare to write a resume or cover letter: List what you'd say to the hirer for your target position that would make him think, "Damn, this person is good,"

Updated daily, Employment Tracker lists employers doing significant hiring.

Negotiate an internship's job description upfront. They're getting you cheap or for free; that means you deserve meaningful work and to get quality mentoring.

Landing A Job Without Prior Experience

It's a Catch 22: You can't get a job without experience and you can't get experience without a job.

The standard recommendation: volunteer or do an internship. But that's risky: Too often, such positions contain more scutwork than resume-building work. Antidote: Upfront, negotiate a worthwhile assignment and quality supervision.

Too infrequently do employers hire interns/volunteers as regular employees. Antidote: No surprise, work harder and smarter than the other interns, and kiss the right asses.

Other routes to getting a job without prior relevant experience:

• Ask relatives, friends, parents of friends, etc. Usually only people who love you who will--especially in this job market--give you a good job without prior experience. Be sure to tout your transferable skills--for example, the leadership and organizational skills you acquired as your fraternity's activities chair.
• Send a portfolio of your work samples to target employers. Want to be a teacher? Videorecord a lesson you teach in his friend's classroom. Want a career in advertising? Design an ad for your favorite products. Are you an aspiring fundraiser? Develop a marketing plan for a nonprofit. Send your portfolio in response to advertised jobs and to target employers that aren't advertising an appropriate position.

Wage Theft: How Employers Steal From Employees and Job Seekers

A client who is a fashion designer told me that when she goes on a job interview, she's usually asked to create a "mock" design. She says she has seen her "mock" designs on companies' line of clothing--including a swimsuit in Vogue.

That reminded me of how often employers ask job candidates to create a work "sample." One employer admitted to me that he had no intention of hiring anyone but placed a job ad. He had all the applicants write a plan for marketing his company's core product, which he then used as free work product. He said, "They were all so eager to get the (nonexistent) job that they killed themselves in creating their plan. I got great ideas." Pig.

And of course, there are internships, which are proliferating: employers convert what used to be paying jobs into no-pay or pittance-pay internships. It used to be you had to be a student to be hireable as an intern but that seems to have gone by the boards. A relative of mine worked as an unpaid intern in the Clinton White House writing Hillary Clinton's daily briefing. After a year of that, she asked Hillary's chief of staff, Evelyn Lieberman, "I feel guilty living off my parents. You have me doing important work for a year now. Could you see your way clear to paying me?" Evelyn responded, "Don't you realize how lucky you are to have an internship in the White House?!" My relative, incensed at the hypocrisy of Hillary, who gives speeches on behalf of labor, wouldn't even pay her, who had won her university's outstanding student award, minimum wage. She quit.

And then there was this employer of mine--a major corporation--that asked me to write 50 articles as an "investment" in the magazine's website, with a promise that as soon as advertising revenues came in, I'd be well paid. Indeed the advertising, lots of it (all national ads, including Viagra!), came in. How much did I receive? $3,000. That's $60 an article. The managing editor said "That's a down payment." I never received another dime.

It ain't easy being a worker, let alone a job seeker in this economy.

For more on wage theft, see wagetheft.org and the book, Wage Theft in America: Why millions of working Americans are not paid and what we can do about it.