Skipped Your College Internship? You're Far Less Likely to Get a Job in Business
By Jonathan Rodkin
August 15, 2014 - Businessweek
College students majoring in business often feel pressure to get
résumé-boosting work experience while still in school. Data show that the
internship angst may be justified.
Business students who said that they had gbusiness-related internshipsh were
much more likely to report having gotten at least one job offer, according to
data collected for Bloomberg Businessweekfs 2014 Undergraduate
Business School Rankings, released in April.
Overall, 75 percent of students said they had an internship. Of
those, 61 percent had a job offer in hand by the winter of their
senior year, compared with 28 percent of students without an
internship.
The internship gap persists across industries, but the difference between
interns and their peers who spent their summers another way is more marked in
some fields than others. In banking and financial services, 70 percent of those
with internships had received an offer, compared with 27.4 percent of those
without internships. Slightly smaller but still sizable gaps come in consulting,
technology, and retail.
Industries where recruiters might look more kindly on your internship-less
résumé include health care; advertising and public relations; and
nonprofits. In the nonprofit field, 41 percent of students with internships
had an offer, and 33 percent of students without internships did.
Is consulting really that much less forgiving than nonprofits toward students
who scooped ice cream instead of gaining office experience? Not necessarily.
Students were surveyed several months before most of them graduated, so many
were still awaiting offers. In fact, only around half of the students surveyed
had jobs promised to them. Traditional business fields, such as consulting and
banking, may recruit, and therefore make formal offers, earlier than other
fields. It may be that students entering nonprofits and advertising rely on
internships just as much as junior bankers, but they simply get hired closer to
graduation.
Bottom line: Internships matter a lot, but they matter more in certain
industries. If youfre entering your senior year and havenft had an internship
yet, consider getting one—especially if your dream job is on Wall Street.