These 5 Virtual Internships can Help You with Your Career

Abhipsa Mohanty is a B.A. English student from BJB College, Bhubaneswar. She got to know about the importance of internships through a cousin and decided to pursue one. Coming from a tier-2 city, she found it somewhat difficult to find suitable in-office internship opportunities. Plus, with her college going on, she couldn't move to some other city to do an internship. At this juncture, virtual internships came to her aid. Being an English literature student, she started applying to various virtual internships in content writing. After a few rejections, she finally able to secure not one but two internships and with tremendous excitement, she decided to pursue both.

For the first internship, she was required to write articles on various topics like lifestyle, tech, food, health, travel, etc. and in the second one, she had to write short stories and book reviews. With constant support and cooperation from her employers, she was always able to complete her articles ahead of deadlines. Soon, the internships got over and she was awarded with a stipend and certificate from each. Pleased with the experience, she decided to take up more internships and as a result, she passed her first year of college with 3 internship experiences on her resume.

Abhipsa was able to start her career as a writer when she was just a first-year student with virtual internships. This way, she was able to gain valuable work experience and develop new skills along with managing her studies. A lot more college students like Abhipsa are opting for virtual internships to add valuable experiences to their resumes and explore different career paths. In fact, as per a recent internship report which we created based on the data in Internshala, we found that higher number of students prefer virtual internships over in-office internships. There are two major reasons behind this – 'flexibility of working' which allows the students to pursue an internship along with their studies and 'the expanded scope of opportunities' from PAN India.

Students who find it hard to pursue full-time internships can go for virtual internships and add the value of work experience to their resume. This not only make their resumes stand out to the employers when they are applying for full-time jobs in future but also, help with the application process when they decide to pursue higher education. To help you understand about the internship opportunities you can take up, we have enlisted 5 popular profiles in which you can pursue a virtual internship.

1. Content writing: Content being an immense part of almost every business, is high in-
demand. This brings a profusion of opportunities for students in content writing. To do this
internship, all you need to have are good research and writing skills since as a content writer, you have to research on the concerned topics and write content in a creative and
comprehensible manner. Also, with billions of topics to write on, learning opportunities are
abundant in content writing like in Abhipsa's case, she got to learn about various interesting topics while writing articles on them.

2. Social media marketing: In the last one-decade, social media has seen a significant boon. People across demographics are actively using various social media platforms to
communicate with their friends and family, to make new friends and connections, and to
convey their messages to the world. Scaling on the same, businesses have found an effectual way of marketing over time, called social media marketing. This opens up a considerable number of exciting opportunities for the students. As a social media intern, you are expected to think of creative and feasible ideas to market a company and engaging its customers over various social media handles including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.

3. Graphic designing: In this era of high competition between companies, customer experience is prioritised rather high. And, since most of the companies are serving through their online products, a substantial part of good customer experience is through a quality user experience of the product thus putting graphic designers high in-demand. So, if you have a knack for creativity then you can do an internship in graphic designing. As a graphic
designer, you might get to work on different aspects of design like UI design, UX design, logo designing, and website designing.

4. Programming: From the continuous technological advancement in different areas like
mobile technologies and web technologies, it is clearly evident that the field of computer
science and information technology is constantly on a rise. This provides the students who
have an interest and aptitude for coding with a bunch of opportunities in diverse areas
ranging from software development and web development to mobile app development.

5. Volunteering: In the present age, we have a plenty of NGOs aiming to help with a diverse number of societal issues and make a change. Creating numerous volunteering opportunities for students, these NGOs provide them with a chance to give back to the society by working for environment conservation, teaching the underprivileged, and helping the elderly. Volunteering internships can help you develop your soft skills, try your hands on different tasks, and most importantly, give you a sense of achievement while you give back to the society.

Author: Sarvesh Agrawal is the founder & CEO of Internshala, an internship and training platform (internshala.com)