It’s that time of the year when internships happen for students. But the Covid-19 lockdown is forcing companies to look at virtual internships this time.
Brewing company AB InBev has 40 B-school students working on virtual internships at its global captive centre and business units to keep it going. “The format of the summer internship remains the same, except that it is powered digitally — in line with the ongoing social distancing directives from the government,” said AB InBev people director (South Asia) Tanushree Mishra.
Internship portals are also seeing companies coming in with vacancies for work-from-home (WFH) opportunities that last for two, four or six months. Internship platform Internshala has seen a 30% rise in postings from companies and a 36% increase in applications from students. “There is a subsequent 27% drop for in-office internships. Some companies have postponed their internships to a later date,” said Internshala CEO Sarvesh Agarwal.
Fintech companies are expanding their scope of internships to outside India. Digital lending platform MoneyTap is evaluating options to hire more interns from the Middle East and Europe as the current environment has provided it with multiple options to explore different skill sets available abroad.
“With this lockdown in force, we are also retaining the many interns who we hired already for HR, marketing and operations teams. Since it is virtual internship, we also save on cost. Thus, it gives an edge to explore the talent available abroad,” MoneyTap co-founder and COO Anuj Kacker said.
However, some of these companies are not offering tech-based roles as data security may be an issue when the interns are working from home. Realme PaySa has 20 interns working on UPI. The company’s CEO Varun Sridhar said, “We have proposed for interns to work for us virtually for another six months and commit 6-12 working hours a week. Unlike technical work, which requires daily monitoring due to data security, these interns will be used for product innovation and testing that can be done from remote areas.”
However, even as virtual internships see an increase, overall opportunities have dropped by up to 10%, say such platforms. Angaros Group director Aashish Malve said that virtual internships in content, UI/UX, design and tech are being given by companies. “The movement of virtual internships has been almost the same as last year. Some of them have postponed their internships and the overall opportunities are seeing a marginal dip,” he added.
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