Now a professional wo-rking with Yebhi.com, Gurneet Kaur has done a total of 17 internships during her graduation. “These included both onsite and online internships. My last eight to nine internships were online. I began as an executive and went onto to become a team leader.
The stints gave me the flexibility to work from home or from campus and during the months my college was on,” says this BBS alumnus from Keshav Maha-vidyalaya, Delhi University (DU).
For Arihant Bachhawat, a computer science engineering student of IP University, the online internship with Aggaweb.com was out of this world. “I was part of the team that was developing an Android application. It will be out in the market soon,” he says with pride. “Every second day, I used to get new tasks that had to be done in an assigned time. It was flexible but professional. It was my first ever internship and helped me know what skills I needed to build to be part of the system,” says this Delhi student.
Beyond assignments from their colleges, students are individually taking up internships to get basic professional skills in order to prepare for the competitive times ahead. “Given the fact that every student wants to intern somewhere good, onsite internships are limited. Many offices don’t have the required infrastructure or manpower to train interns. In that case, a virtual internship comes handy,” says an HR manager on condition of anonymity.
Arsheen Sabharwal, a third-year student from Khalsa College, DU, and an online intern with Youth Must Read agrees. “An online internship has given me the flexibility, less or no commutation hassles, a professional task-based ap-proach and a stipend. But, I need to time myself right and act like a professional in return. This is the sole challenge of working by yourself,” she says.
There are already an astonishing number of online internship application portals like Twenty19.com, Letsintern .com, Hellointern.com and letmeknow.in. To date, Twenty19 .com has shortlisted over 28,855 students from 2,000-plus colleges for various internships in about 3,000 companies. This year, the portal has observed over 125 per cent growth in the number of companies coming forward to hire interns over last year. “The talent crunch makes companies open to new methods of recruitment. A key factor, however, has been the quality of students who are looking to do internships. By the self-selecting nature of these internships, where only interested students take the time out for these stints, companies are able to access good quality talent,” says Karthikeyan Vijayakumar, founder and CEO, Twenty19.com.
Presently, over 90 per cent of the companies pay stipends. “Their objective is to bring fresh thinking into the company,” says Rishabh Gupta, CEO and co-founder, Lets intern.com.
“The best part of the deal is that these internships can happen at any time of the year. They peak during March-July and then during the winter break from December-January, but a lot of part-time, virtual and full time internships go round the year,” adds Gupta.
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