BBA and the importance of Internships

Organisations across the world are in a frantic need of students who have the required knowledge, skills and expertise of working in an environment wherein the business landscape is evolving at the speed of thought.

Internships are typically pursued while the students are still studying in college and allows the student a risk-free environment to work under supervision and even mentored by experienced administrators. It’s also a wonderful way to bridge the gap between learning and finding an occupation that can help students move quickly towards a career objective while making informed decisions on what you want to achieve with your life. Internships also enables students to acquire and even refine their personal skills and competencies that are in high demand by organisations while offering an invaluable insight into industry practices.

I now focus on the five Vs that students might gain through internships where they learn about the workplace culture, organisation practices, employee relations and leadership structure.

• Venture out of your comfort zone – Internships that are undertaken before graduation provides students with an opportunity to challenge and even re-look at worldviews that they have believed for a long time horizon. The idea of dealing with unfamiliar settings and having to work on newer real-world problems will force the students to get out of their comfort zone and lead to self-discovery.
• Variety – Internships typically provide a great exposure to students across key functional areas, key customers and critical projects. This would force interns to quickly adapt and adopt the state-of-the-art practices that are considered by companies as world-class.
• Value – Internships provide students an opportunity to hone a range of professional skills such as articulation (story telling), professional writing, critical thinking and problem solving skills and working in teams. While students may read about how companies succeed and operate in their textbooks and classroom discussions, nothing compares to gaining the actual exposure when they work on a real project for a real company with real people and provide a fruitful solution to the problem. An internship will help the students to not only learn about their capabilities but will also encourage them to have better traction on their strengths and weaknesses and learn more about themselves.
• Vision – During the internship, interns can afford to make mistakes, correct and learn from such mistakes and gain immense experience to develop their vision for personal growth from a long-term perspective. This vision will help students to transition from what they learned in the classroom to what is actually required by organisations.
• Virtual/Hybrid experiences – Corporates post COVID-19 have taken a dramatic shift towards both remote and hybrid learning environments. The future of work will get heavily influenced by generational, technological and social shifts. Interns can obtain a first[1]hand exposure to technologies such as machine learning, artificial intelligence and blockchain at the workplace and increase their marketability

You can learn all that you want from textbooks, faculty and your peers, but taking those skills into the workforce and applying them is a wonderful way to explore functional areas and career paths that would actually suit your individual interests once they start working full-time after graduation.

Internships give students a wonderful platform to establish relationships and acquaintances – your network is your net worth. Building such critical professional connections before graduation can prove to be handy when they have to pursue a full-time job after completing their courses.

Last but not the least, internships help you figure out not only what you like but what you don’t like – this goes a long way in not taking up a job that might not be a good fit for your background.

About the author

Dr Vaidyanathan 'Vaidy' Jayaraman is the Global Dean (UG) at SP Jain School of Global Management (Sydney, Singapore, Dubai and Mumbai)

Note: The views expressed in this article are solely author’s own and do not reflect/represent those of Shiksha