Without PR or any social networking, it seems exceptionally difficult to find a job overseas. The wide variety of internship programmes offered for international students make it difficult for one to distinguish the right opportunity, which would add value in your career growth. Are you still considering how to choose an internship opportunity? Ecare tells you one unchanging truth:
If it sounds too good to be true, it is NOT true!
Due to being in the field for several years, Ecare has been through a variety of experiences which have led to the 9 Job-Hunting rules. Now, Ecare is sharing these golden rules with you to ensure every student keeps their eyes open to prevent pitfalls.
1. Only formal internship opportunities from official cooperation are reliable
When you see commercials like “100% top firms internship guarantee”, will you doubt its authenticity as I do? The best proof is to check the video or written text from the employers, which explicitly mentions that the firm is officially partnerting with the recruitment agency for hiring interns. For most of the times they advertise to guarantee you an internship to the Big Four, but it turns out that you only go to some certain domestic office cooperating with the Big Four companies. They manipulate words for which you end up paying nearly tens of thousands.
2. Hidden dangers from outsourcing internship institutes
While searching for internship opportunities, many students come across so called recruitment agencies and training institues, such as Professional Year institutions. These institutions may claim to have directly partnered with the employers to help them source internship candidates, which actually may not be the case.
The key is to carry out a research on the institution that you want to approach regarding internships. Moreover, after ensuring their legitimacy, one must be proactive with the process. If you do not follow up with the institution frequently, they may not look for opportunities for you as actively.
A long wait but no good jobs coming
How long will it take to find an internship through PY institutes? At least 2 to 3 months or longer. Because they have to firstly guarantee their PY students to have the internship opportunities. In addition, after several months of waiting, most of the good opportunities may be given to others already. Therefore, when finding internships, it has to be formal institutes that have directly coordinated with employing companies with first-hand employers’ resources. In this case, you can get the access to the best opportunities at the first site while the waiting time period is greatly shortened.
3. Success cases: truth comes with pictures
If you want to learn about a training institute, you must go have a look at their success cases. Sometimes even what you see can be deceptive. Thus, if the institute could walk you through their success cases with pictures of the candidates, then it is a authentic. The credibility of cases that have no pictures and just name codes is questionable.
4. Fake interviews make you deceived
This was recently brought to our attention by students who themselves attended fake interviews. After having been told that they will be interviewed by the top investment banks' HR team, they realized it was a scam when they attended the interview. The interviewer was a third party and the venue was a university lecture hall. Interviews like this are far from being convincing.
Ecare has advices towards this case: if the interviewer is not the manager or from the HR department of the employer company, then the interview will 99.99% be fake. So don’t take is seriously, or you will lose the game.
5. Distance internship: spend the money to buy comfort
There are 3 strengths required as a must when searching jobs abroad:
- Analytical skills
- Solid technical skills and knowledge
- Efficient communicating skills
These 3 skills must be polished by attending relevant seminars, workshops and training programs. It is impossible to gain any solid working skills by staying at home and clicking the mouse. The so called 'distance internship' is nothing but to send you some emails and give you some coursework, the only thing you are required to do is to hand in a report or a presentation. Then what is the difference of this from studying an extra course in school? A bad distance internship will not bring you any good training results except from several lines on your resume. It will never help you with any improvements on your working skills, nor to help you with finding jobs. Your lack of skills will be soon revealed after you begin working for the company.
Apart from that, when you sit at the other side of the computer, you don’t even know what your boss looks like, how do you make sure the internship company is real?
6. Only internships with work insurance are reassuring
The companies will pay for the work insurance of their formal employees regardless of where they are located. It will cover any physical or financial loss of their employees caused due to any accident at during work. However, mostly the employers will not pay for work insurance for their interns as they are only for temporary. Therefore, either the interns have to purchase the insurance for themselves or their agencies buy it for them. Nowadays, most of the employment agencies do not pay for work insurance for the interns.
In order to benefit international students, Ecare purchases the work insurance covering for every contracted student. This prevents the student from incurring any extra cost and insures the candidate in case of any accident at work.
7. Pay attention to the contract validity as well as the terms and conditions
In Australia, a contract with legal benefits must be a contract in full English, with official stamps and the signatures from both parties. The terms and conditions of the contract should also be paid attention to. For instance, does the 100% guarantee internship mentioned in the contract mean that you will find a position in relevant field that adds value to your career, or just be placed into a random position?
If you are not satisfied with your internship company, according to the contract, do you have the right to say NO?
8. Career consultant: professional qualification matters the most
Does the career consultant you faced to really have HR experiences? If you only attend the career training courses, your tutor could be an accountant or financial manager. But once it comes to the interview session, you need an authentic specialist with various experiences in the HR field to help you with professional interview trainings. In Ecare Careers, we have the most qualified specialists with over 10 years’ experiences in global HR corporations, who can provide the most comprehensive, detailed and effective interview counselling from a professional perspective.
Last but not least, all those traps mentioned above may be only a tip of the iceberg. So make sure you compare among choices and be cautious when making a decision. Meanwhile, Ecare is constantly upgrading and refining its job guiding services, in order to further improve the positions and employer resources we provide, thus to better serve our international students.