More Courses or more internships?
Nadir Arda Oral
20 replies
When hiring someone for your team, would you prefer they have completed more courses or have done more internships?
Rather than the schools they attend, the number of courses people take to improve themselves and the number of internships they work in has recently received attention.
So which one do you pay attention to?
Replies
Cigdem Toraman@deeptechvc
Internships are more important than the number of courses that have been taken.
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Both can be good and bad depending upon the quality of course or the company they chose to intern with. I would pay attention to their takeaways.
Naturally depends on what type of role they are applying for, but I'd possibly value experience from an internship over courses if I was looking at two comparable candidates.
@stevenbirchall If there would be two candidates both with the same amount of time spent on internships but one of them had a long-term internship and the other one has had various short-term internships, which of the two would you prefer?
@umutgunbak good question. I guess I would need to look at the internships and see how relevant they were to the position I was hiring and also what type of company the internship was at.
Someone who had a long-term internship at a startup (where I'd know they pretty much were working as employee) would definitely draw my interest.
I think more internships...coz of it are a great way to start building your professional network and develop skills...Financial planning firm Money Accounts will assist you with all your investment planning.
Nothing beats experience
Internships & experience definitely carry more weight, but it's worth digging into the quality of the program and getting a good read on what the candidate actually gained exposure to and built / delivered during their tenure. Some companies get it right and their interns finish with applicable skills & highly employable, whereas many others simply don't know what to do with them and fail to deliver a meaningful or valuable experience.
@jade_mack
I agree with you; internships are always seen as experiences, but people don't pay attention to what they contain.
Especially on LinkedIn, most young people list jobs that they have not gained much experience.
Definitely try to land a paid internship in finance, that's truly how it should be. I don't disagree that it's not really amazing for getting your foot in the door, but it is something.
Definitely more internships. It allows you to apply things that are learned from courses to real work environment
I dont think these are mutually exclusive.
Start with internships, figure out what problems the company has (or you have working there), then take courses to help you solve those problems.
@travis_page I'm using exactly this method right now, and I'm so glad to hear from you. Keep moving forward!
Internships 100%. Having done internships shows that you have at least some on-the-job experience as opposed to just having theoretical knowledge.
Internships
Prior experience is what is more important to hiring managers, since they don't want to waste time training new direct reports. Theoretical content from courses rarely applies to requirements on the job. At Bootcamp2, we've recognized the chicken and egg problem where it takes experience to get a job, but in order to get a job, you need prior experience. We've created the world's first career simulation (bootcamp2.com), where we teach crossfunctional students beyond PM/design/SWE to build features at scale for TeamWyrk.org.