Choose Your Own Adventure: Company-to-Internship Edition
Your first job. When you think about it, you feel everything all at once—it’s exhilarating and overwhelming and the gateway to the rest of your life. But if you’ve held an internship (or three), you’ve got a head start. After all, a solid internship is the first step in your career.
But not all internships are created equal—and not all of them lead to your dream job. When a company hires you for three or four months, they aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their heart, and they certainly aren’t getting a great return. Rather, they’re betting on your future—that by investing in your career now, they’ll convert you to a full-time team member once you graduate. (Side note: you can check out our findings on where to intern for a full-time offer here.) In fact, in 2018, 59 percent of interns were offered a full-time position and 77.3 percent accepted an offer, for a conversion rate of 45.6 percent (as per NACE’s 2018 Internship and Co-op Survey Report).
That’s impressive, but if the other 54.5 percent of interns end up working elsewhere, where do they go? Previously, we looked at the four companies you were most likely to work at based on the internship you did. Now, we’re looking at the four internships most likely to get you hired at a specific company. In the diagrams below, the company is at the center of each figure, with the four most-popular pre-job internships surrounding it, ranked. One stipulation: these findings do not include those who interned at the central company—and, as discussed above, nearly half of interns convert to full-time employees. For those of you interested in keeping your options open when you intern, however, read on.
AT&T
Chegg model
AT&T appreciates talent with varied backgrounds, hiring interns from competing telecommunications firms Ericsson and Verizon. It also hires from multinational conglomerate General Electric (GE) and car rental company Enterprise Holdings.
Chevron
Chevron likes its full-time employees to be well versed in the oil and gas industry. It hires interns from ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, and Shell.
J.P. Morgan
Those with some financial know-how will fare well when pursuing a career at J.P. Morgan. It hires interns from Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, UBS, and Goldman Sachs.
Unilever
Jacks and Jills of all trades should consider interning at Unilever, which hires interns from across industries. Employees have interned in cosmetics (L’Oréal), food and beverage (PepsiCo), and consumer goods (Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson).
Qualcomm
Qualcomm, which produces and markets semiconductor and telecommunications equipment, prefers its employees with a strong background in the field. It hires interns from Broadcom, Intel Corporation, Texas Instruments, and BlackBerry—all technology, software, or telecommunications companies.
SpaceX
Aerospace innovator SpaceX hires similarly inventive and scientifically minded interns from General Electric, NASA, Boeing, and Tesla.
