Internships often serve as an important stop along the path toward a successful career. For one, it paved the way to a first job. Another credits it with helping her choose a profession. And others say it taught them about the kind of place they want to work, the specific job they want to do or simply what to expect from a real-world workplace.
Regardless of their specific rationale, young people getting started in the advanced manufacturing and logistics sector say internships, even as early as high school, can play key roles in launching and advancing careers.
They would seem to be in good company. Online job search and recruitment firm Zippia notes that, each year, about 300,000 people intern in the United States, working in virtually every industry sector, and LinkedIn lists thousands of openings for supply chain, logistics and manufacturing interns.
Kiree Brown would tell students to seize one of those opportunities. A Customer Account Specialist at Total Quality Logistics in Indianapolis, Kiree says she values what she learned in an internship while she was still a high school student, and that the internship truly paid off when she interviewed for her current job. “They looked at my resume and said, ‘Oh! She did an internship in high school!’” she says. She’s been working with Total Quality Logistics for nearly a year.
For Justus Lockerbie, his internship with GrinOn Industries, an Indianapolis-based maker of serving systems that fill beer glasses from the bottom up, brought to life things he had been learning in school. “That definitely really spurred my desire for manufacturing,” he says. That experience also helped him land another internship, with Subaru of Indiana Automotive, where he works as an Industrial Maintenance Technician while pursuing a degree at Vincennes University.
Austin Sims also interned at GrinOn Industries, which he says gave him a sense of what the working world is really like. Without the GrinOn experience, he says, he might not have realized how much he would value a laid-back atmosphere where communication is a high priority. “It showed me the kind of workplace I would like to work at,” he says.
And then there’s Morgan Montgomery. Her time interning at Cummins not only gave her a taste of what she wanted to do with her career, but also a sense of what she didn’t want to do. She arrived at Cummins as a marketing intern; in no time at all, she realized that she preferred spending time on the plant floor. When she got back to school the next fall, she switched her major to finance and management. She went on to do a couple of internships with Rolls-Royce, where she was hired full-time after graduation and now works as a Planning and Control Manager in Massachusetts.
That’s the kind of environment Austin Sims says he found at GrinOn. As a result, he says it was a great internship that left a lasting impression. “They made sure it was not just a good experience for them, but for me, too,” he says. “It was definitely an experience I will 100% remember forever.”
