“You’re running around in snow, rain, cold, and I would be standing on a subway platform saying ‘What am I doing here? I used to send people out to do errands for me,’ ” says Franklin, who formerly ran a trading department for an investment firm. “You really have to get over that.”
The training developed her writing skills and, eventually, allowed her to launch a website for mature women – TheRealCougarWoman.com – host her own Internet talk-radio show, and write a book to be released in the fall.
As the recession has deepened, the need for nontraditional internships has gone up.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, for example, professionals looking to reenter the science and technology fields can enroll in the Career Reengineering Program, a 10-month part-time curriculum that requires students to take a class in the fall and complete an internship in the spring. Over the past year, inquiries about the three-year-old program have increased 50 percent, says Dawna Levenson, associate director of the program.
Though most internships cater to the college crowd, Ms. Berger is slowly starting to see the intern role shift to include adults. Now, rather than turning away résumés she receives from adults, she’s passing them along to companies offering “alternative internships.”
Among them:
•Last fall, Sara Lee Corp. in Downers Grove, Ill., launched a “returnship” program and hired 10 adults for three to six months.
•New York banking firm Goldman Sachs last year ran an eight-week pilot internship program from September to November, offering 11 women a chance to return to the finance industry.
•Since April, Babyboomers.TV, a website start-up company featuring articles geared toward baby boomers, has hired four mid-career interns, offering each a $100 weekly stipend.
