Take An Internship Path To Working At Home

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Last summer I needed to hire help for my podcast network and had financial concerns about paying someone to learn everything I would need them to do, knowing it could take weeks to cover all the bases.

Since many had come to me for paid consulting to help them learn the ropes in podcasting, I knew I had valuable training to offer and figured that I could offer a simple trade in the form on an internship. In exchange for a set period of service, I would teach them everything they needed to know - and there was the possibility of a permanent paid position at the end of the road.

It worked like a charm. I found a great gal with a strong interest in podcasting and at the end of a fruitful summer learning curve I added her to my team at Mom’s Talk Radio where she remains today. My clients love working with her and she is growing her own fantastic media virtual assistance business day by day.

This spring I took on two more interns. One is a working mom who wants to work her way home by starting a VA business. The other is my nephew who is partnering with me on a local website hosting and design company. Both of them have embraced a period of working on projects for free in exchange for my training and feedback. It is a win-win situation for everyone.

Is there something that you would like to do to work from home but need training for? Consider offering yourself up as an intern for ten or twelve weeks. If you can commit to at least ten hours a week of free service, I don’t see many established business owners turning that kind of support down. Still - it is hard work training an intern. Even though I do get free work from them I have to invest a large chunk of time to training and interaction, so I am very careful about who I choose to work with.

If you know someone you’d like to intern with, sit down and make a list of what you would hope to learn from them and consider how much time you could commit to serving their projects. Then simply compose a letter of introduction and propose the possibility of an internship. The worse that may happen is that they would decline but perhaps if they did have to say no they would recommend someone in their field who might be interested. It’s definitely worth a try.

If you do seek out and win an internship, I hope you’ll let me know about it

Kelly McCausey is a home business coach and host of Work at Home Moms Talk Radio. Learn more about profiting from internships at Mom’s Talk Biz.