On Saturday, March 6th, first-year MYRA PGDM students attended a virtual workshop on “Internship Readiness”. It was delivered by Vidya Singh (Manager – Human Resources, Airbus Group).
Vidya is a Bangalore-based HR executive with over twelve years of experience in strategic HR business partnering, talent management, performance management, learning & people development, and HR global compliance. In this hour-long session, she drew from personal and professional experiences to impart valuable advice to MYRA students.
Key takeaways included:
- Resumes should be carefully crafted – and include projects, topics, and hobbies that you are familiar with and interested in. These serve as conversation starters between the job-hunter and the interviewer. Through this conversation – the HR rep can assess whether you are a good culture-fit.
- Prepare well for your job interview. Be mindful of how you present yourself, and what you wear. Read up on the company and understand the products, services, and office culture. Advance preparation shows the interviewer that you are passionate about securing the job. Also, everyone should be able to answer the questions “what do you do when you’re not working or studying?” and “can you walk me through your profile?”. These questions are important because hiring managers want to know your personality and ability to communicate – and not just how many lines of code you’ve written or how many clients you’ve managed.
- Try not to ramble during an interview. Give well-structured and succinct answers to all questions – and then elaborate further if required.
- It is better to do an internship in your major (rather than another field). This will help you build your profile, which will in turn help in placements. For example, if you want a good finance job, then a finance internship will be more beneficial than an HR internship.
- Hiring managers typically look for four things: communication skills, learnability, the potential for success in the company, and how badly the candidate wants the job.
- Internships can help students develop valuable skills related to decision-making and stakeholder management.
- Start-ups and established companies provide different internship experiences. A start-up has fewer people which exposes you to many different things. Whereas an established company allows you to really understand one specialized business-function. Students are allowed to experiment and explore interests – especially during this global pandemic. But they should take their internship seriously by identifying key learning objectives for themselves.
- Companies need interns. An executive team’s workload is not always constant – so when things get busy, interns are hired to help. Also, managers may be very busy with day-to-day tasks – and might hire an intern to focus on a very specific initiative of theirs. Interns at MYRA will be able to apply their PGDM coursework directly to the industry – and are also are given an opportunity to network with like-minded professionals and mentors. Interns gain good experience from attending meetings, executing tasks, and providing value to their office.
- These days, many HR and recruitment functions are being automated. The pandemic has really sped up this process. However, where there are people, there will be interesting problems for HR professionals to solve.
