While the global challenges of COVID-19 on businesses and recruitment have meant a temporary end to face-to-face internships, many companies are exploring virtual options. For students, virtual work opportunities have great benefits: you can gain experience, develop your skills and create networks in the world of work – all accessible from the comfort of your home! King’s Careers & Employability have highlighted a website that you might be interested in if you’re on the hunt for virtual work.
What is InsideSherpa?
InsideSherpa is a platform that advertises work experience opportunities, internships and other virtual experience programmes from a wide range of companies. You can find virtual internships and work opportunities through the legal, finance, consulting, tech, engineering, marketing & media and social impact sectors – and the list goes on, with new positions listed all the time. Internships and opportunities are available in all kinds of companies from start-ups to big names.
As well as exploring opportunities, students can also access CV & cover letter templates as well as video guides to help with virtual internship applications.
The King’s Careers Take: For students who are looking to build your portfolio of work experiences during this time, virtual work opportunities are a great option to keep active in your career journey. Our extensive career resources on Keats, include guidance for virtual applications and interviews.
How do students sign up?
Programmes are free to all students with a university e-mail address. When signing up to the platform, you’ll fill out information about yourself and your preferences around professional sectors (these can’t be changed later to choose wisely or click all!). Then after the registration is complete, InsideSherpa shows youyour recommended Virtual Experience Programs – but you can also view all of their current opportunities as a sliding viewer across different sector groups.
Good to know
When ‘enrolling’ onto an individual internship, students are asked a series of multiple-choice questions about their knowledge of the organisation/the particular career, where they heard about the programme, and if they want to give permission for their details to be passed to the organisation – this can, of course, be opted out of.
If you’d like to know a bit more about InsideSherpa and what other students have thought about their virtual work experiences, why not search for content containing ‘insidesherpa’ on LinkedIn – you will find many results of students posting their reflections and experiences.
It’s important to remember that internships aren’t the only way to build employability. For those of you self -isolating and hoping to keep active, consider online options like virtual volunteering. It could also be an opportunity to develop some new skills using online platforms such as LinkedIn learning, (free for King’s students). Maybe it’s the opportunity you have always been waiting for to learn a new language, write your own blog or start a YouTube channel. Remember – everyone is in the same boat and when employers view your CV, they will all recognise that this period of time is not business as usual.