English Opening Doors

Internships can be tough. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great opportunity for those who haven’t had the experience of working in their field of choice and want to learn what the job, and the career for extension, really looks like with all the challenges involved.

When you’re an intern, you most certainly are studying and, as we all know, students are one of the “brokest” people category. So you face this: making time to study, to put everything you are studying in practice, making time to rest and eat, doing some healthy activities and having a social life – after all, you are most probably young and trying hard to take advantage of the lifestyle your youth allows. Try to not sleep more than 6 hours over 30 and you’ll have similar symptoms as a strong flu or something similar.

As you are starting to know me and my writing style, this is where I jump in the story. There I was: early 20’s, a heavy social life, studying at night and taking an internship in the morning and leaving my afternoon “free” to study, write school papers, rest a little bit or doing something for myself such as doctors appointments, organizing my personal stuff, etc.

My internship was pretty cool – I was working at the university where I was studying (yes, spending pretty much the entire day in the same building) at the Public Relations division. My activities were the most wide-ranging possible: I sometimes was making people coffee, writing reports for the webiste, transcribing recorded interviews, moving panels around the campus, hosting people at meetings – I mean, everything. But as I mentioned before (the students-are-broke part specifically), I wanted to make some money and the internship was paying me through a discount on my school’s tuition. So I started looking for opportunities to make some extra money.

After accepting a 12 hour “free-lance” event at the University and being paid with a sandwich and a can of soda, I decided to explore other opportunities. Or at least I tried – many internship openings required experience (really? I can’t still figure this out), unreal expectations for the role or the time didn’t match my schedule. And then I thought to myself: what can I do (or offer) to get a nice job? I don’t have much experience, I don’t know how to work in communications yet but I do have English.

Now, do you remember I had a heavy social life? Well, it totally paid off. This girl I knew (who became a dear friend) was telling me how she was working with international clients but she didn’t know how to speak English very well and that she was tired with the amount of clients she was dealing with at that moment and she practically begged me to apply for the job.

This job opportunity was to work with Social Media and I had never worked with that before and didn’t know anything about it but I did have fluent English and a strong (and fast) will to learn. The interview was wild – the boss was repeating himself every 5 minutes reminding me how I wasn’t fit for the role as I knew nothing about it and that it was going to be a very bad idea to hire me. My friend stood up for me, defending my skills (and my honor! Haha) anyway he ended up hiring me as an intern but she would be “held responsible” for any mistakes I might make.

This was not easy but I knew I was able to perform well, to learn the things I needed fast. My first day and I had a 3-hour videoconference meeting speaking just English with 3 other people from the United States. That day my boss understood why I was about to become so valuable – the international income was very important and I was the best person to deal with the clients. We all learned a valuable lesson that day: him, not to undermine anybody, me, as in how should I never

doubt myself if I am capable of doing something or not, and my friend, that understood sometime trusting people pays off.

Do you see? English opened a door for me only by itself. I don’t think we pay attention to that the way we should – it’s one of the most common job requirements but have you ever noticed how impressed people look like when you are confident enough to speak English in front of them? It’s much more than a language ability, you show strength, focus, proactivity. And one thing that is as important as specific skills is the way you inspire people to trust you. We always look for people whom we can trust: to be clients, to be service providers or to work together.

Whenever you apply for an international job opportunity, they will first of all read you qualifications and skills. Then, they will want to meet you. This is the part where you can either get the job or not and it’s 100% up to you – English here is almost obligatory at this point. If you don’t know it very well to communicate effectively or if you are too shy to talk the way you must in these situations, how will it affect the results?

This is food for thought this week.

But if you already noticed its importance and want to improve your abilities so your chances get exponentially higher, message us here!