When I graduated from high school 16 years ago, I had no idea what I wanted to do for a career. Like many students, I was told to do Engineering because I was good at math, but I didn’t know anyone who was an engineer or what engineers did. Deciding what career to pursue or what university major to study are a significant life decision that 3.8 million kids make every year, just in the U.S., but they are incredibly uninformed when they make that decision. It’s difficult for students in school to know what jobs exist, let alone what the day-to-day work of those jobs looks like before entering the workforce.
Even University classes don’t prepare you for the day-to-day work in a field, but there is one university experience that does prepare you for it: internships.
Internships have been an essential part of introducing students to the kinds of work and people that they will be dealing with for the rest of their lives. But it’s difficult for companies to bring on high school interns for a few reasons:1.) Companies don’t always have tasks at the appropriate skill-level for high schoolers.2.) It’s difficult to line up the schedules with students still in school
3.) Even if everything goes perfectly with the student, they will likely be off to university in a few months leaving the company without benefiting from the time they invested in training the student.
It's very different from university students who are given time away from classes to do an internship, are likely to join the company full-time after the internship, and who already have some industry-specific knowledge and commitment to the field.
This is where simulated internships come in. Simulated internships, like the ones offered by Echo Internships mirror real-world working experience but for a simulated company with dozens of AI generated co-workers all in different positions across various departments including Engineering, IT, Product, Marketing, HR, Legal, and more. In a simulated internship, the interns still participate in standup meetings each week, gain firsthand exposure to the roles and responsibilities of different positions within the company, and perform real-world work. But the interns don’t have to make the same level of commitment to a company, take time out of classes, or show up physically.
The simulated internships are designed to essentially provide high schoolers or recent graduates with exposure to the day-to-day work of an incredibly wide range of different career options, all before choosing a university major or entering the workforce.
Simulated internships are especially important for students growing up in areas or families where they aren’t exposed to a wide range of career options. In the small coastal town where I grew up, the educated people I was exposed to worked one of three categories: healthcare (doctor/nurse), education (teacher/principal), or trades (plumber, electrician). If this had existed when I was graduating from high school, it would have saved me 10 years of changing from job to job trying to understand what career was right for me.
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