Remember the first day of your first internship? Getting off the
bus or MRT, gazing wide-eyed at the office buildings towering
overhead, and feeling like an imposter in the office attire you
bought the day before.
To bright-eyed, bushy tailed young interns, getting a job offer
from your latest holiday gig can seem like a matter of luck and
connections. After all, that must be the reason why your otherwise
unremarkable coursemate already has three job offers while you,
with your Mensa level-IQ, are still left out in the cold.
I’m going to be upfront and tell you that there are some companies
that simply do not have room to hire newbies, and take on interns
simply because they’re cheap labour. If you’re in a smaller company
and feel exploited, that could be the case.
But for those companies that aren’t running on a shoestring, you
can drastically increase your chances of receiving an offer by
avoiding the following, which give companies a good reason to say
sayonara at the end of your internship.
Many students start their internships thinking that if they keep
their heads down and do their work the best they can, they’ll
impress their bosses.
If you’re some kind of technical whiz, sure, your genius might be
enough to get you a job offer.
But for most interns, particularly in non-technical fields, here’s
the hard truth—you are clueless, and the company does not have 6 to
12 months to invest in your training.
So the kinds of tasks you are given will mainly be of a support
function. (If you’re one of those investment banking interns being
paid $8,000 a month to sell your soul to the company, this does not
apply to you.)
This also means that competently doing whatever work you are given
is the bare minimum. And no matter how well you do it, a thousand
other interns and their mothers can do it too, so if that’s the
only thing you bring to the table don’t expect to get hired.
Conversely, you get major bonus points if you manage to participate
more actively in real projects, and get the company to start
thinking of you as part of the team. Once that happens, your
chances of retention are high. But to get to that point, you might
need to actually open your mouth and try to get involved.
You’re not the first intern and you probably won’t be the last. You
might think your boss does not notice that you’ve been surfing
Facebook all day because you’ve cleverly camouflaged your browser
window with ten work-related document files. But seriously, most
employees know (and probably use) all these tricks themselves, and
can spot them from a mile away.
Replying to a few WhatsApp messages at your desk probably won’t be
too damning, but you want to make sure you’re still giving most of
your attention to your work.
If you find yourself in the situation where you don’t have enough
stuff to do or the company just doesn’t want to entrust you with
more complex tasks, ask to sit in on meetings or shadow another
employee.
Whatever you do, don’t fritter away your time on social media or
personal matters, enjoy long lunches or spend hours gossiping with
the other interns, thinking you’ve “earned” it for finishing your
work. You will be noticed and judged.
No matter how good you are at your work, unless your skills are in
short supply or you are truly given a chance to display your
genius, your boss is going to be more interested in your attitude.
(Of course, if you really suck at whatever work you’ve been given,
that’s another story.)
The way to leave your superiors with a good impression of you is to
display a genuine interest in learning. If you manage to come off
as a passionate person with a thirst for knowledge, unless the
company has no room for employees, they’ll be scrambling to offer
you a job.
That’s largely because Singaporean companies have huge problems
with employee motivation and retention. We constantly receive
appalling scores in surveys measuring employee
engagement andsatisfaction at
work.
That means it is super hard to find employees who don’t look damn
sian at work, actually bother to try to master their craft and are
willing to go the extra mile instead of complaining that
something’s not in their job scope.
No matter how brilliant you are, if you don’t seem interested in
the work or invested in the company, there’s a high chance you’ll
lose the job to that siao-on intern who volunteers for everything.
That’s the law of the jungle.
The post 3 Biggest Reasons Singaporean
Interns Fail to Get Job Offers appeared first on
theMoneySmart blog.