Ten top tips: how to behave during your work experience with a graduate employer
Congratulations: if you’ve got a work experience placement or internship lined up with a graduate employer, you’re already on the way to the career you want. This is your chance to gain some insight into your chosen career sector, collect some practical examples of your skills for future graduate job applications, and make a good impression on a potential referee. Keep our ten top tips on how to be a star intern in mind and you’ll get your graduate career off to a flying start.
1. Be professional. Turn up on time. Look the part – check on the dress code before you start, and if in doubt, go smart. Don’t spend time on personal phone calls, e-mails or Facebook. Don’t take extended lunch breaks. If you get the chance to socialise with the people you are working with, take it, but make sure your behaviour is beyond reproach.
You want to make an impression for the right reasons. Be a good colleague: remember that the people you are working with may be under pressure. Try to make less work for them, not more.
2. Be realistic. It’s a good idea to establish what your internship or work experience placement is likely to involve at the outset. In an ideal world, you’d be assigned to a fascinating project and start making your mark right away. In practice, your work experience may well involve some routine tasks – as do many jobs, especially in the early stages of your career.
Even routine tasks can develop skills such as attention to detail, communication, numeracy, organisation and teamworking. Prove yourself to be reliable and efficient, and more interesting opportunities may follow.
Remember, if you are doing a short work experience placement it may not be practical for your employer to give you complex tasks. However, if you are doing a relatively long internship and come to feel that your work experience is not developing your skills, you could ask your work experience mentor or supervisor if you can get involved in some more demanding work.
If you have undertaken a long, unpaid internship, perhaps having already graduated, and you are not being given any opportunities to develop professionally, you may want to reassess whether your work experience is the best possible use of your time.
3. Be enthusiastic. Even if you don't always feel it.
4. Take everything in. You can learn from what you observe as well as from what you are invited to do. Take note of how your colleagues communicate with each other and with external contacts.
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- The top ten skills that will get you a job when you graduate
5. Build relationships – don’t force them and don’t neglect them. Be friendly and receptive, but not pushy.
6. If you need to, ask. If you’re unsure about what you’re doing, it’s much better to check than to guess. Colleagues prefer to take time to help you do things right, rather than have to pick up the pieces later.
7. Think before you speak. Be diplomatic. Don’t make any assumptions about the relationships between the people in the office, and be very wary of being drawn into making critical comments about anybody, or anything, in the workplace. Don’t be a bull in a china shop – sometimes it takes caution and tact to negotiate office politics.
If you get the chance to sit in on any meetings, only contribute if you’re sure it’s appropriate. Try to pick the right moment to ask questions – for example, not when your supervisor is frantically preparing for an imminent deadline. Unless, of course, your question is genuinely urgent.
8. Be a chameleon. Try to be aware of the working culture and adapt to it, taking your cues from those around you (while maintaining your professionalism, of course). For example, if it’s a very quiet office, don’t make lots of very loud phone calls.
9. If you get the chance to use your initiative and show what you’re made of, go for it.
10. Remember, it’s a learning experience. In an ideal world, you’d come to the end of your work experience and be offered a permanent job on the spot. However, while some graduate employers may treat internships as a recruitment tool, in the main, work experience is just that – an experience. It may confirm that you’ve chosen the right graduate career sector for you, or prompt you to re-evaluate; you could come away eager to return on a permanent basis, or determined to look elsewhere. However your work experience turns out, you can learn from it.
