How to Get an Internship With No Experience

September 2, 2026 · updated October 6, 2026 · 6 min read

The internship paradox: every posting wants experience, and the internship is how you get experience. Here's the honest part nobody puts in the posting — "no experience" is the default state of internship applicants. Companies that hire interns know they're hiring potential. Your job is to give them evidence of potential and to show up in enough pipelines that the odds work. Step by step:

1. Build a resume out of what you already have

A first resume isn't empty; it's just not a job history. Employers reading intern resumes look for signal, and all of these count:

• Coursework with output — a class project with a result beats "relevant coursework: Marketing 101". "Built a demand forecast in Excel for a mock retailer; presented to 40 students."
• Anything you made — a club poster, a spreadsheet for your family's business, a small app, a TikTok you grew, a fundraiser you ran. Numbers attached, always.
• Non-fancy work — retail, food service, tutoring, babysitting. It reads as reliability, customer skills, and the fact that someone paid you to show up. Recruiters respect it more than students think.
• Skills with proof — not a skill soup, but 5–8 you could survive a question about.

2. Make one thing this month

The single fastest resume upgrade is a two-week project in your target field. Business? Write a one-page teardown of a local company's pricing. Design? Redesign an app screen you hate and post the before/after. Data? Analyze a public dataset about something you care about. It won't be great — it will be evidence, and plenty of applicants have none.

3. Aim where first-timers actually get hired

The best-known internship programs draw enormous numbers of applicants and can afford to favor people with prior internships. Meanwhile these are often more open to first-timers:

• Small and mid-size companies — at a 30-person firm, your application is far more likely to be read by the person who would work with you.
• Startups — chronically understaffed, impressed by initiative, and title-flexible.
• Local businesses, nonprofits, and university labs — less glamorous, equally valid on a resume, and often the door to the next thing.

The name on your first internship matters far less than its existence. The second internship is where selectivity pays.

4. Play the volume game honestly

With no experience, your per-application odds are lower — which means the answer is more applications, not more agonizing over each one. Plan on sending dozens of applications, not five. This is the drudgery Internly tries to take off you: it shows you internships in your field and country, and where the employer uses an application form it supports (a minority of listings today, mostly in the US) a right swipe fills out and submits the application from your profile. For the rest it saves the role and gives you the employer's link.

5. Convert two or three into referrals

Pick your favorite targets and find one human at each — an alum, a club connection, anyone. A referral gets a first-timer's application read in a way a cold one can't count on. (More on why in our LinkedIn piece.)

6. Be easy to say yes to

Reply to every response within a day — from one inbox so nothing gets lost. Take every interview, even for roles you're lukewarm on; interview skill is trainable and transfers. And when you get an offer that isn't your dream: take it. Experience compounds; waiting doesn't.