(Photo by: Mike Kemper)

Students who attend JCCC know they will receive a top-notch education at an affordable price. Students will learn, grow and gain the real-world experience they need to enter the workforce.

How do students take what they have learned at JCCC and transfer those skills to the real world? Internships are one place to start. An internship is a temporary work experience designed to gain practical, hands-on experience in a specific field or industry.

If students are interested in an internship, they should start preparing six to nine months in advance.

“I think it’s really important to start the process early,” Amy Smith, Internship and Employee Relations Coordinator, said. “It’s never too early to be talking about internships and preparing for them because if you start at JCCC, and you’re able to procure an internship between your sophomore and junior year, that’s going to put you very much on a level playing field as you enter that four-year institution.”

A good first step in preparing for an internship is to visit JCCC’s Career Development Center and work with a career development coach.

“If you don’t have a resume ready, it’s better to start with us because we can help get your resume ready,” Lorie Humphrey, Career Development Coach, said.

The Career Development Center also offers students the ability to complete career assessments to see where they fit within the workforce.

“We also have a career assessment called the Focus Two, which is a pretty standard career assessment where you do five mini self-assessments, which gather some suggested job titles with links to them, so you can read them and research them,” Humphrey said. “It’s free. It’s online. You don’t have to see us, but it’s a really good idea to come in and process with a career coach because it’s kind of overwhelming.”

Students searching for internships can find opportunities on these general job sites:

• JobLinks is a free job and internship database provided by the JCCC Career Development Center.
• LinkedIn is a professional social networking site that connects people with professionals and employers.
• ZipRecruiter is an online job and internship marketplace that connects job/internship seekers with employers.
• Parker Dewey is a platform that promotes micro-internships.

According to Smith, Parker Dewey is an amazing place to start.

“If you are not sure if you’re ready for a full internship, but you want to get exposure to a field, Parker Dewey is a micro-internship platform,” Smith said. “They will post a project, and generally those projects are, say, 20 hours, 25 hours, something along those lines–a short-term project that shouldn’t take more than a few weeks, and they are in a wide variety of areas.”

Internships can lead to jobs with the company you intern with, but they are not the only way to gain experience, and not all students want to pursue internships.

“I think students sometimes get hyper-focused on this term that it has to be an internship, that’s the only way to gain experience. And that’s not true. And so, what I try to do with students is find a wide variety of ways to get experience, whether it’s through a micro-internship, whether it’s through volunteering, whether it’s through shadowing,” Smith said. “I like to help students think more creatively about it… If you use the Career Development Center, we can help you figure out creatively how to get that experience instead of thinking, ‘Well, there’s just one way to do this.’”

The Career Development Center can help students develop a plan for when they are done at JCCC.

“We do have a career action plan that we follow, a menu of things that we would recommend students work on,” Humphrey said. “Create a plan moving forward and try to think that by the time a student leaves here, they will have touched upon most of the big topics in career development they’ll need to be prepared to get a job.”

JCCC Career Development Center Hours are from Monday-Wednesday, 8 a.m. – 6 p.m.; Thursday, 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.; and Friday, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

To learn more about internships, contact Amy Smith, Internship and Employer Relations Coordinator, at [email protected] or call 913-469-3598.

To download the JCCC Career Development to your Canvas, visit the Career Development Center Canvas page.