Internships

Interns are usually provided by your local college or community college. Call a student advisor at a college near you.

Criteria - Usually the only criteria is as follows (But again, refer to the college advisor's requirements):

1. You can provide a position that is conducive to advancement in their particular field of study.

2. You are willing and able to provide an environment of learning. (Be willing to help and answer questions)

3. You're willing to take on an intern. Usually, colleges have a hard time finding enough companies willing to take on an intern, and there are more interns available than spots for them to fill.

By the way, I've provided spots for interns twice, and both times they became full time employees after their education was completed. It's truly a win-win situation, at least it was in my case.

Speaking from the experience of just hiring an intern, I can give some advice on how to find a job as an intern. One of your questions was what qualifications are needed? We use our interns as an extention of ourselves; if there are tasks that are repetative or simple to do we deligate those to our interns. Examples would be re-imaging our R&D lab and installing a stack of software on certain machines. Normally a task such as that would take a senior engineer several hours.

Another example is cases where running to every computer and running a script is needed. Although proper remote administration is nice, manual labor is sometimes needed.

So I would define the skills needed for an intern position would be an advanced level of computer literacy; you need to be able to read directions and reload machines according to writen procedures. If you can take and pass one of the workstation level MCP tests, such as 70-210, or 70-270 I think is the XP Pro test you will be in a great position to get a paid internship.

Now as for how to find an internship there are a couple of schools of thought. Many people I know have got their jobs by calling around to consulting companies and asking if they have any openings for a part time, unpaid intern. Mention that you have no experience in the field, but you believe you are capable of taking some of the manual labor load off of the senior techs. You will be looking for the manager of the IT department, any lower and they will not be able to approve it, but any higher and it is likely they will not know there is a need for an intern. Mention that your movitation for working for free will be after six months you would like to get a letter of recommendation if the manager sees fit.

If I could offer one tip from working with several interns in the past... Be open to following directions and just do the job you get asked. We have had interns in the past that try to whip up crazy scripts to do stuff, and it ends up