Thought Leadership
October 28, 2024
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Like many international students, 23-year-old Hitomi from Tokyo made a long journey from home to study overseas. She spent eight energizing weeks in New York City undertaking intensive English studies. Hitomi also shares the desire of many international students to prepare for the global economy by gaining work experience in a different country. Until recently, that next step would have been pretty challenging, as factors ranging from work restrictions for foreign students to high living costs have often made that impossible. But now, with virtual internships, all that is changing.
Thanks to a virtual internship, Hitomi will seamlessly pivot into a 16-week marketing internship in Ho Chi Minh City — from the comfort of her home in Japan. She will be part of a highly international workforce in a global company, in which a unifying qualification is the ability to work in English. This arrangement would have been practically inconceivable a few years ago. But fortunately the changing nature of work, and particularly the move to hybrid and virtual workplaces, has put this new tool into the toolbox of international educators and companies seeking a diversified workforce.
New arrangements like Hitomi's virtual internship are sorely needed if we want to succeed in building talent for a global economy. There has been much discussion lately about the challenges facing U.S. university graduates entering the workforce. But it can be even more difficult for non-native-English speakers to gain a toehold in international organizations, in all fields and perhaps especially in the sciences. The first step, of course, is to learn English, but the goal is to improve employability: 40% of post-degree Kaplan students have said that employability is their primary objective1. How can we best help these students prepare and, indeed bridge the transition from learning to work?
One scenario would have us moving students into in-person internships or work placements in the country where they learned English. But this is isn't always possible or practical for international students. There are also financial barriers to overcome, of course, as internships are often unpaid. And there are geopolitical challenges, too. Relationships between sending and receiving countries may go through ups and downs, creating visa and immigration implications (see the Canadian government’s recent decision to reduce student visas for language students). And there are the periodic surges in populism that can make certain countries less hospitable to international students, to letting those students stay on to work, or both.
Drawing on the explosion of hybrid work arrangements since the pandemic, virtual internships have evolved as a creative and productive tool to help navigate these obstacles. Just this month, Kaplan International Languages began partnering with the company Virtual Internships to offer students like Hitomi access to remote work placements in conjunction with their English courses. These internships are located in countries all over the world, are fully remote and highly flexible, and require strong English skills for participants to be successful. They create a smooth transition from learning to work, reinforcing students’ newly acquired language skills, increasing their confidence, and enhancing their employability.
"New arrangements like this are sorely needed if we want to succeed in building talent for a global economy."
Virtual internships break down barriers in important and sometimes unexpected ways. They avoid immigration hurdles and changing political tides. They eliminate travel and other expenses. They ease the potentially daunting transition from learning to work. In our case, Kaplan offers extensive support, from guidance on CV development to interview preparation. And they give students the ease of living close to home while also expanding their horizons in key ways:
Gaining expertise with businesses and professional practices in other countries which build competencies such as adaptive thinking, cross-cultural communication, and networking in unfamiliar environments.
Putting their English to use professionally while continuing to perfect their English skills. Students can learn to navigate the technology of virtual work and gain experience as part of a diverse team.
A virtual internship certainly isn’t the same as an in-person job placement, but that doesn’t mean it lacks huge value. Those of us who may not be digital natives should understand that in today’s global workplaces, a fully or partly virtual job has become absolutely standard. That means giving students this kind of work experience provides international students vital real-world experience. At the same time, as we unlock students’ English skills and place them with real-world projects to manage and problems to solve, employers see significant benefits as well. Companies seek workers with global skills — including professional-level English — whether they work remotely or hybrid, or whether employees are foreign nationals or domestic. English is the language of international business, and companies expect their domestic employees to speak English even in their non-English-speaking home countries to ease their fit in a global economy.
All this means that virtual internships are a new way of helping international students reach the goals they have always had: secure a better job, facilitate a career change, or create a better life. As the workforce becomes increasingly digital and global, employers and universities alike should recognize that moving students into remote job placements to gain experience is part and parcel of the future of work — and simply integral to how we all get things done. Old barriers — geopolitical, financial, regulatory, cultural — are being quickly eroded by these welcome waves of progress.
1. Based on 25,852 respondents of an internal 2018-2019 survey
