Can internships be considered experience for applying jobs?

Question

When we do our internship program for project as part our acedamic process(one semester), will it be considered as experience for applying jobs?

Answer 1

It depends on where your internship is, what you do during the internship, and who you're applying for.

If you do your internship at XYZCorp doing electrical engineer and apply for a job at XYZCorp doing electrical engineering, almost certainly.

If you do your internship arranging flowers the local flower shop and apply for a job at as an electrical engineer, probably not.

Answer 2

If your experience list is thin at the moment then yes you could. There is nothing wrong with listing internships in your CV, as long as it is relevant to your field of work.

There are also other ways to gain experience for programmers, one example may be contributions to open source software projects and another is to hack your own projects. As long as you do something that is relevant then it should be good.

Answer 3

I would say almost always yes. (with the exception of already dense CVs, of course)

There's the easy case, as James Polley mentioned, whereby your internship is directly relevant to the job offer, but even if it does not it may well say much about you that potential employers would like to know.

You may have worked in a completely different field, but have acquired skills that are relevant - such as 'people skills' or 'logistics'.

You may simply demonstrate that you're a hard working person that would rather work and learn from people, in whatever field, etc.

Bottom line - you don't know what will leave an impression on prospective employers, and in the most general sense, any experience you go though contributes to who you are, so why not?

Answer 4

You certainly learned something during your internship. This is up to you to sell it as experience when applying a job.

Even ikebana is a worthwhile experience that teaches style, minimalism and a rigorous mind.

Answer 5

Internships and co-ops primarily matter for your first entry-level job for two reasons:

1) It is often your only practical real-world experience.

2) If you interned for a "name brand" company, it is an indication that you have passed a competitive screening process.

3) If you had multiple internships in the same place, it's an indication that you were well liked and are on your way to get rehired.

4) You often stand a better chance of going full time.

Do not underestimate the name brand recognition. A boring internship in a place like Microsoft or Google counts more in the US market than a really interesting internship in an unknown local company. Academic internships (i.e., working for a research product in your university) are useful for grad school applications but can be detrimental for real-world jobs (i.e., person was too much in academia, not enough writing "real" code).

After you have full-time job experience, past internships do not generally count. The only exception is that you have had exposure to a domain. For example, if you interned at a developer for an investment firm, and then went to work as at a place like Microsoft, if you later wanted to apply to a financial company you might get a bonus for having financial exposure.

Note that projects done in school for a client company are not always counted as real world experience.