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Does anyone here work in the IT industry? Would anyone happen to know of anything someone can do to get a leg up potentially become full time during an internship (Network Engineering).
I have run several tech companies and worked in some high performing team. My experience is more software development than network engineering but the two are similar.
Employees often overestimate the importance of technical skills. We need a few really technically competent people but most just need to be able to do their job. Many technically weak people have succeeded in the industry. Even productivity requirements are often not that high and as long as you are producing something on a regular basis you are fine.
My main issue with devs is the inability to think. Developers who get assigned tasks and only focus on those tasks going away always cause problems. Your job is not your assigned tasks and the goal is not to clear tasks. Your team has some higher goal. Maybe it is a new feature, maybe the company wants to build new infrastructure and increase network load 10x. Maybe they want to get some compliance certificate. You need to keep the actual goal in the back of your mind and question what you are doing and ensure that it is aligned with the actual goal.
It is mindboggling how many in tech have worked on a product for years and have zero clue how it works, what the clients are, what the product road map is or the what the value of what they are working on is.
Lets say you are working for a company that makes software for dentists. Some people will work on the booking flow for months without really having any sense of how the booking goes. Instead of actually thinking through things words like booking, patient or dentist become abstract words. For example a sentence like "A dentist can only work one shift a day", becomes "A zongzong can only wingwang one zong per wang". It is some obscure businessrule that they have memorized but has no concrete value or meaning.
Taking responsibility for the network is key to succeeding. Feel a sense of ownership over it. It is your job to ensure it is doing its job and that it is improving. This doesn't mean going rouge and doing your own thing, it means asking questions, coming with suggestions, finding better ways of doing things and protecting the interests of the users.
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Find someone who's been around the block to take you under their wing, ideally a striver and/or middle manager. Endear yourself to them, but don't be cringe.. They can help you get promoted, find a better position in the company as they advance in their career, or help you get your foot in the door if they leave for a better place.
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You obviously need to demonstrate competence, but you already know that; that's table stakes. And the other suggestions to seek out opportunities to demonstrate leadership, find a niche to fill that's being undeserved/overlooked by more experienced engineers, etc. are great. But don't forget that an internship is also 50% about figuring out who is socially compatible with the team. So be friendly and helpful. Chat with your coworkers. Find potential mentors and take them out for coffee to ask questions and build a rapport. Bring in snacks for the office every once in a while. By the end of your internship, you want half the office forgetting you're not a permanent employee because you just feel like a part of the team. At that point, not giving you a job will feel like firing you, and the question shifts from a "why" to a "why not." Worst case scenario, you now have a stable of amazing references who are happy to reccomend you to friends at other companies who may be hiring.
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The answer is really quite simple: you have to show promise. Demonstrate that you know newer stuff that existing engineers might not be aware of, that you are willing to do more stuff than the average intern, that you are quick on the uptake.
Don’t underestimate the importance of soft skills and “reading the room,” still. I’ve seen competent people get passed on all the time, and usually by the idiots supervising the interns. That said, IT and infosec really is a “team sport” with a lot of interdependencies between its members.
“Standing out” is also more than simply “knowing the answer” to certain things. Having an approach that’s otherwise “custom” to who you are is something that adds great flair to your professionalism, because lots of other people beside you will have the same standard knowledge base that you do. We’ve all gone through the same courses and same certs. There’s great importance in differentiating yourself.
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IMHO knowing stuff is less important than being quick learner and communicate well and be generally pleasant to work with. My experience with interns (software not networks but I think it's pretty similar) had been that nobody really expects the intern to know everything, or even a lot. But if we see a person who's actively learning and advancing, who can be relied on to deliver on the task that is assigned and maybe even go a little beyond that, and who is generally nice to work with - then people would seriously think about permanent hire. A lot of companies are always looking for good people, and it's a perpetual problem that it's hard to know if somebody is good from a few interviews. If you know somebody already, and know they've got potential, the lack of experience and knowledge can be excused - people learn new things all the time, as long as the person got basic fundamentals and good brains, most of the stuff can be learned. Especially now that you can ask LLMs to do a lot of leg work for you.
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It depends on the company, really. When I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, the answer was "be somebody's nephew" or "be a hot co-ed".
If you can't manage that, my best advice is to "show leadership". Find projects that might improve revenue or reduce costs, find out why they haven't been done yet, and write up a proposal to your internal mentor if the reasons don't torpedo any solution you might have.
These are all things that generalize to every industry and typically fall under the rubric of “networking.” One of the most important lessons I give to those who ask me around the time they hit the labor force is “work has the exact same politics as high school.” You’ve got your kiss asses. You’ve got your dick riders. You’ve got the lazy people. And then you’ve got those who actually do the work. Figuring out a way to ingratiate yourself with whatever the in-group is, is part of the game you play in any workplace situation, and it requires you to be observant.
Be careful when it comes to being indispensable. People will inevitably take the work you do for granted in you let them and if you draw attention to yourself and become pigeonholed as “that guy,” you can turn the things that make you into a good worker into a liability that gets you into trouble.
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