Do you think remote internships pay well? Some companies in the U.S. have been offering up to 8K a month for intern remote positions. That’s quite attractive! Luis tells all about it.
The thing is each location may apply its different measures. But recently, the large job aggregation site, indeed.com, reported an evaluation on the state of the internship market and discovered the following:
- The share of internship postings per million job’s postings on the Indeed U.S. website is down 39% from 2019
- The share of remote internships has taken off and is now seven times greater than in March 2019
So, companies are hiring fewer interns, but most of those who do, prefer them to work remotely. Interesting, right? Tell us what you think!
Luis:
Do remote internships pay well?
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen to Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis. And you will see that my double espresso is slightly drained because, believe it or not, this is the third take. Well, whatever. Let’s enjoy whatever’s left of coffee.
Yeah. Sorry. I usually don’t do multiple takes. I like to record it raw, but they really were quite bad. I was attacked by a wild pack of felines twice, but now they’ve been fed, so they’re quieter. So let’s try to talk, without any cat interruption, let’s talk about remote work internships. Do they pay well? Well, currently in the US some companies have been offering up to 8K a month for intern remote positions.
Indeed.com, the large job aggregation site, recently released a report that dives deeper into the state of the internship market. They made the following observations. Number one, the share of internship postings per million job postings on Indeed US website is down 39% from 2019. However, number two, the share of remote internships has taken off. It’s now seven times greater than March, 2019. So interesting. People are in general hiring less interns, but most of the people who do are doing so remotely, and some companies pay rather well.
So why the sudden surge on interest? And it’s actually quite simple. As someone that seen many transitions from office to remote, I can tell you remote comes with a lot of logistic overhead, especially for teams that haven’t been designed from scratch for it. It’s a constant improvement process, it’s a constant documentation process. And interns, for better or worse, are the top choice for handling documentation-related tasks, organizing a company’s Wiki, updating some spreadsheets, organizing Basecamp, et cetera, et cetera. It’s pretty nice to have interns do that, especially on some companies that aren’t that big and where the specialists need to devote 99% of their time to their specialty.
Now, of course, documentation is an ongoing process, and everyone should have their input on it. But, overall, it’s always nice to be able to have someone to say, “Hey, look, we have all these documents that are about our process. They need to be organized into something. Please handle this for me, et cetera.”
I mean, in my world, in the world of marketing at least, there’s always a need for outreach, and that’s something that if you’re a good… I mean, good outreach is difficult to do. Usually outreach is super boring, and people don’t like doing it, and people don’t like being the targets of it. But when it’s done well, when there’s someone that’s really good at it and that’s good at teaching it, that’s a situation where interns can shine because with a good teacher, they can grasp and become really good outreach people quite quickly. So, there are a lot of remote positions that can be done by an intern, and it’s probably going to be quite good for the interns themselves because they’re getting experience in the new way of working remotely.
That’s the situation. Should you apply for a remote work internship? Looks like it’s a good time to do it. Of course, always beware. In my world, before the marketing world, it was the writing world, and there’s this annoying trend in writing that you should write for free for exposure or for practice, and I am a thousand percent against it. If you apply to a remote internship, you need absolutely to be compensated by what you bring to the table. Now, I’m not saying that you should demand 8K per month. That’s the upper limit, but definitely do not be lured by promises of, “Hey, you got to work into a wonderful team, and you’ll learn how to do remote work, and you’ll learn how to do this, and we’re paying you approximately nothing.” Don’t do that. I know that in some cases it might sound appealing. It might seem that you’re getting the foot in the door for remote work, et cetera, et cetera. It just devalues the market for everyone, and you are worth more than that. You’re absolutely worth more than that.
How do I know? Well, because just statistics tell me that you’re worth more than a free internship. So please do look for the opportunities, but know your worth. Don’t accept that just because a position is remote, which is quite nice, you have no commute, no et cetera, most remote companies offer flexibility, don’t let that reduce the value of your contribution.
So that said, if you do want to look into remote work opportunities, and if you want to make the best out of them, you should educate yourself, and the best place to do so is thinkremote.com. At thinkremote.com, we are constantly putting out guides about insights, the latest insights on how to do great remote work, on how to be more optimized in working remotely. We also have the latest remote work-related news. So please check out thinkremote.com.
This was Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis. See you next week.
