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When is the best time to apply for internships?

When applying for full-time jobs, do previous internships qualify as work experience?

  • e.g. If it says "Required: 2-3 years of relevant work experience" on a job description, and one were to have several internships under the belt totaling 2-3 years, would that be equivalent?

  • Answer:

    Job requirements are wishlists, not mandatory qualifications. For the right candidate who is otherwise desirable enough, almost every one of them can be bent or waived. To give one personal example: I was once hired to a job that "required" 5+ years of technology experience with only a 3-month internship in the field under my belt. I'm not mentioning this to brag, but merely to point out that job requirements can be extraneous if the hiring company feels that the candidate has certain skills that compensate for a lack of direct experience. How else do you think so many former collegiate and professional athletes get hired directly into senior sales and/or finance jobs? It's because many of these companies think that demonstrated leadership & teamwork ability can overshadow an experience deficit. To your specific question: Yes, you can count your internships as "work experience." But I'm just trying to make the broader point that you shouldn't think of job requirements as absolute requirements, apart from some obvious exceptions like a law degree for a lawyer job, published research for a professorship, etc.

Patrick Mathieson at Quora Visit the source

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Absolutely internships count for work experience. University of Waterloo computer engineering majors graduate with 2.5 years of "work experience" because they complete so many internships. The more internships the better!

Ambra Benjamin

My rules for adding internships to resumes are: Yes, but only if you have less than five relevant jobs for the position you're seeking AND only if it's been less than seven years since the internship was completed. The only exception I make is if internship was within last seven years and it's for someone or someplace highly memorable, like Warren Buffet's office or on The Hill in Washington, DC.

Victoria Darling

If the experience is indeed relevant then your internship absolutely qualifies as work experience.  That's precisely why internships exist...to give you valuable experience!

Jeff Metzger

Absolutely yes!

Triin Linamagi

In today's world, experience is just a word. You need two things 1. You should be good at something 2. You should be good at speaking (and listening). Companies are increasingly open to people who are good and can get the job done.

Shankar Ganapathy

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