Almost five years after the Great Recession ended in 2009, the requirements for recent college graduates to get into the job market are significantly different than before the recession. Today, businesses of all sizes must play a proactive role in preparing new graduates to get into the job market.
Before the recession started, the five-step path to a obtaining a good job was as follows:
- Graduate from high school with good grades.
- Get into and attend college.
- Make decent grades.
- Graduate.
- Apply for and receive a good job that pays a decent salary, has potential for growth and provides good benefits.
For millennials, this formula isn’t working. Each year we are seeing more and more diligent college students complete steps one through four only to enter a workforce for which they are not properly prepared.
The end result is that these graduates don’t secure good jobs in their field or land jobs that they didn’t need to attend college to get.
Prior work experience required
While our economy is on the upswing, obtaining a good job upon graduation is a challenge almost all graduates face today and will face for the foreseeable future.
Graduating from a good school with good grades is a basic requirement for recent graduates to be considered for a good job. Many employers, however, will only hire those graduates if they also have prior work experience in their field of study.
College students must have internships in their chosen field of study that provide that real world work experience.
There is no guarantee that an internship will turn into a full-time job. The chances of a recent graduate with internship experience obtaining a good job are much greater than one without that experience.
Interns are good for everyone
Businesses of all sizes can help millennials prepare to enter the new workforce by making sure their companies provide good internships for college students.
Internships provide participants with real work experience that gives them experience in their field of study, pays participating students a decent wage, and provides a structured and supervised learning environment that provides interns with honest feedback about the work.
Hosting an intern is not just good for the interns, but it also can be good for the business. It can provide businesses with a low-cost workforce to help get work accomplished.
While managing an intern or an internship program is not easy, the pros of hosting interns greatly outweigh the cons.
Most importantly, supporting and providing internships goes a long way toward helping build a workforce of millennials ready to compete in the new economy.