5 internships and counting: Is ‘internmaxxing’ in Singapore becoming an arms race?

Fresh graduates in Singapore are entering a tougher job market, even as employers continue to have entry-level positions to fill. At the same time, hirers are looking beyond academic qualifications, while artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape entry-level work.

In a three-part package, The Business Times examines the changing graduate job market, how students are preparing themselves for work, and what it means for the role of universities.

[SINGAPORE] Unsure of her ideal career, Jasariel Chee chose to stay in school for an extra year – and spent her spare hours interning at an office job. 

While pursuing a political science degree and a second major in strategic management at the Singapore Management University (SMU), she took on four internship stints across fields such as learning and development, public relations, as well as communications.

The 24-year-old delayed her graduation by a year to take on an extra internship, bringing her total internship count to five.

The internships, she told The Business Times, allowed her to learn more about different industries, develop soft skills and professional networks – skills that extend beyond the classroom.

Three of the five internships were in public relations or communications roles. 

“I think employers treat a clueless intern with more grace than a clueless graduate,” said Chee. 

Still, having accumulated five internships did not mean a short job search.  Chee still had to send out more than two dozen job applications and went through three interviews before receiving two offers.

She eventually secured a full-time role in communications.

Another graduate has a similar experience. Just like Chee, NTU graduate Dallen Chua took on five internships. 

Internships are important because the “working world is really different from studying in school”, said the philosophy major.

He felt that internships are so important that they “trump... GPA (grade point average)”.

Some of his friends with good grades had struggled to find work, he noted, and later felt that they had focused too heavily on their studies and completed too few internships.

“Some of (my friends) realised it was too late to just focus on studies alone,” he said,

The internship race? 

These examples may be an outlier but the average number of internships taken is ticking up. SMU graduates completed an average of 2.8 internships in 2024, up from 2.6 for the 2020 cohort.

A 2025 report noted that among 865 Nanyang Technological University (NTU) students, 50.3 per cent said they had completed or planned to complete two or three internships, 11.4 per cent said four or five, and 6 per cent said more than five.

This phenomenon of stacking multiple internships – or “internmaxxing” – may stem from the pressures of competing in the job market, but employers also have some part to play. 

It is a growing emphasis on workplace experience by universities and employers.

Relevant job experience was the top-ranked hiring factor for 48.2 per cent of job vacancies in 2025, ahead of skills and abilities at 20.1 per cent and academic qualifications at 9.4 per cent, a Ministry of Manpower survey found.

Associate Professor Walter Theseira, a labour economist from the Singapore University of Social Sciences, said that anecdotal evidence showed that there is “certainly a sense of heightened competition in recent years”. This has led many students to consider pursuing more internship opportunities. 

“Internships and past work experience is just one way that graduates acquire workforce skills and signal quality to employers,” he said.

Universities themselves have also placed greater emphasis on internships. For instance, they have been compulsory for NTU undergraduate programmes since 2021, while SMU requires students to complete a credit-bearing internship.

“Our graduates are entering a more discerning market, where employers look closely at demonstrable skills and experience rather than credentials alone,” said NTU deputy president and provost Professor Christian Wolfrum.

“Beyond the classroom, internships provide an important bridge between academic learning and professional practice.” 

Employers, too, are using internships to identify potential hires.

At global hedge fund Millennium Management, its internship programme is the “primary pathway” for early-career talent to join the firm, said Fred Dura, its head of Asia-Pacific human resources.

More than 50 interns joined Millennium in the Asia-Pacific region this year, and a “significant majority” of its Singapore interns received return offers, he said.

What the firm looks for in young talent is also evolving. 

While strong academic performance and field of study remain important, Dura said, artificial intelligence is widening the pool of candidates Millennium can recruit, particularly for non-technical roles where it can help bridge knowledge gaps.

But it cannot replace “strong problem-solving skills, critical thinking and creativity”, he added.

Manufacturing company Frencken similarly uses internships as a recruitment pipeline. It assesses whether an intern is a potential “keeper”, follows promising candidates after their internships and may recruit them upon graduation, said the firm’s president Dennis Au.

At DBS, CEO Tan Su Shan had said in an earlier interview with BT that she preferred to bring talent into the bank before they graduate.

“Everybody does well in interviews, so it’s really hard to tell, and attitude comes through only when you start working together.” The bank will be doing more internships, she added. 

Increasingly, students appreciate the value of internships.

A group of NUS researchers, led by Professor Jessica Pan with her co-investigators Associate Professor Liu Haoming and Associate Professor Kelvin Seah, told BT that internships can benefit students by developing practical skills and signalling their readiness to employers.

Internships can also aid students by helping them assess potential career fit and expanding on their professional networks, noted the researchers who are part of an ongoing project that seeks to understand how internships shape students’ educational experiences and career pathways in Singapore.

Credential inflation

However, the NUS researchers made the caveat that while having more internships may make the fresh graduates resume look more attractive, this process resembles a “credential inflation”.

“An internship may initially provide useful information to employers, but its signalling value can decline as more students acquire the same credential,” said the researchers.

In addition, taking on more internships might result in students investing more time and resources into even more internships, despite marginal gains in skills or knowledge, noted the researchers.

“Students chasing internships without real learning behind them is the actual risk, not the number they stack up,” said Professor Alan Chan, provost at SMU.

Prof Chan reiterated that what matters is not the internship count on a resume, but that each experience sharpens the students’ ability to apply what they have learnt to real life experiences.

Employers similarly emphasise the substance of the experience. Frencken’s Au said internships should give students meaningful and interesting work from which they can learn, rather than simply routine tasks.

What gets left behind? 

But as students chase quality internships over quantity, campus experience – through education and co-curricular activities (CCAs) remain central to student life experience, said universities.

“Internships and experiential learning are valuable, but they are one part of a richer university education that also includes academic inquiry, overseas experiences, community engagement and entrepreneurship,” said Professor Aaron Thean, deputy president  for academic affairs and provost at NUS.

While Chee, the SMU graduate, said that the extra year of education and five internships were “worth it”, she still holds some regrets pertaining to her student experience.

“I wish I participated more in CCAs like sports (and other experiences). These skills do come in handy at the working level – for instance when finding common topics with colleagues,” she said.

“Students also need to keep in view that aiming their university experiences largely towards obtaining their first job might be something they regret later on,” said Assoc Prof Theseira from SUSS.

By aiming their student experience towards their first job, students do not know if their first employment or line of work is what they really wish to pursue in the long run, or if it will be something they succeed in the long term, he added.