Colleges from across the nation are honoured for promoting internships and improving the employability of their students.
With the aim to upskill India’s youth and improve their employability by encouraging them to pursue internships, Internshala, the recruitment and training platform, organised the ‘Internship Day — 2021’. During the online event, colleges from across India were felicitated with awards for their exceptional efforts to improve the employability of their students by encouraging them to pursue internships during the summer months from May to August.
In a bid to encourage academic institutions to take significant steps to raise awareness among their students about the role of internships in preparing them for the professional world, Internship Day was launched in 2018. It is a national event hosted every year on August 25 by Internshala to promote the internship culture in colleges. It is a four-month-long event where Internshala provides consistent summer internship support to all the colleges across India and honours the top colleges that made exceptional efforts towards building a meaningful internship culture.
This year, over 1,500 educational institutions participated in this four-month-long journey and more than 67,300 students got benefitted through this initiative. Internshala also helped colleges through its ‘Intern Skills Campaign’, a sub-initiative of Internship Day that emphasises the importance of learning and polishing new skills through internships. The campaign also provided relevant internship opportunities to the students of the participating colleges through a dedicated internship page on the platform. The platform also helped colleges in guiding their students on how they can register for free on Internshala and how they can make good applications for internships.
During the Internship Day event, 37 colleges from across the nation were honoured for their outstanding efforts in helping their students find internships, thereby making them career-ready. The top-performing colleges included Paavai Engineering College, Chandigarh University, and Banaras Hindu University.
In addition to the felicitation of 37 colleges, as a part of another sub-initiative ‘Internshala Grants’, 12 colleges were granted free of cost Internshala Trainings worth more than ₹6.5 lakh to help students learn in-demand industry skills. This initiative was launched with a belief that all of us, as a community, should relentlessly work towards the betterment of our students and help upskill them.
An open dialogue session was also organised during the event on the topic ‘Optimising the Journey from Internships to employability’ for the college fraternity. This session was aimed at empowering them with the best resources to make better training and placement strategies. During this session, the panellists discussed real-time problems faced by TPOs and shared tried-and-tested solutions appreciated by a lot of TPOs from tier 2 and 3 institutes. The panellists included Dr Sunita Tank, founder of Leaders in Making; Dr Shitalkumar Rawandale, Dean of Placements at Pimpri Chinchwad Education Trust (PCET) and President of Maharashtra Association of TPOs; and Prof Ashish Bhateja, Asst. Professor in the mechanical engineering department and faculty convenor for MHRD’s Innovation Council.
Sarvesh Agrawal, founder and CEO of Internshala, congratulated the winning institutions and said, “Internship Day is a celebration of the internship culture in India. For the past 10 years, our mission has been to connect the students of India with meaningful opportunities. Together with the colleges from across India and the support of companies who come forward to hire young talent, we have been able to help over five lakh students find internships every year. ”
He added, “With the Covid-19 outbreak in 2020, there also came a lot of uncertainty around the future of students of India. In this trying situation, it was the dedication and selflessness of the teachers that helped the students in overcoming these challenges. For this, I express my immense gratitude and respect to all the colleges and teachers for it was with their support only that we could help 67,000+ students find internships in the past four months.”