It’s not too early to seriously start thinking about that internship application. Top tech companies are already looking for interns. And, while these highly-coveted intern spots might be hard to get, if you can land a summer job at one of these bigwigs, you’d not only be padding your resume big time, but also your wallet.
Plus, there’s a good chance the internship could lead to a stable full-time job. An internship survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers last year showed that, on average, about 60 percent of companies' interns turn into full-time hires. Employees brought on board in this manner, the survey showed, have a much better chance of keeping their jobs five years later compared with hires with no internship experience.
Internship pay at some tech companies exceeds that of the average annual wage of a US worker. Business Insider and the careers site Glassdoor recently put together a list of 20 tech companies that pay their interns the most. Among the top ten on the list are the ubiquitous giants that also appear annually on the list of best places to work for in the US:
10. Apple, average monthly intern pay: $4914 (annual: $58,968)
9. Yahoo, average monthly intern pay: $5191 (annual: $62,292)
6. Google, average monthly intern pay: $5678 (annual: $68,136)
3. Microsoft, average monthly intern pay: $5936 (annual: $71,232)
2. Facebook, average monthly intern pay: $6056 (annual: $72,672)
But number one on the list is a company that might come as a bit of a surprise:
1. VMWare, maker of cloud and virtualization software, which pays its interns a monthly average of $6536 (annual: $78,432)
The good news is that many of the companies on the top-paying list are also ranked as some of the best places to work by current and former interns—and they’re hiring, according to another Glassdoor report. The top-20 highest-rated companies that are hiring interns in 2013 include: Google (rating 4.6), QUALCOMM (4.2), Microsoft (4.2), Intel (4.1), Cisco (4.0), IBM (3.9), and Amazon (3.9).
So if these companies aren’t already on your list of places to apply for an internship, they might be worth adding.
Photo: Google
Prachi Patel is a freelance journalist based in Pittsburgh. She writes about energy, biotechnology, materials science, nanotechnology, and computing.
