While your internship is a great chance to experience Australian work culture and get a feel for real hands-on work in your chosen industry, it’s important to remember that it’s also a learning experience for you.

To meet your required learning outcomes for the internship, and for your own valuable personal reflection on the experience you’ve gained, you are required to complete logbook for every day that you attend your internship.

Your logbook should contain all the key information needed to verify your learning and should include a summary of your experiences, learning and tasks completed each day.

To complete your logbook, log into InternMatch on your desktop or download our easy-to-use logbook app “InternMatch”. Downloaded to your phone, the InternMatch logbook app is an accessible and simple way to enter your logbooks every day.

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. It’s very acceptable, and even encouraged, in Australian workplaces to ask questions throughout your internship. You can ask questions to clarify requirements or tasks assigned to you and about the expectations about your work that your supervisor has set.

Asking questions shows engagement and enthusiasm towards your internship and will often lead to key insights which will improve the overall impact you make to your host company.

For example, closed questions are questions that only require a yes/no answer. They don’t provide a lot of information, so you should be mindful of using them too much during your internship. Remember, you are there to learn! How do you learn if you don’t ask good questions to find out things that you don’t know?

You will probably find open questions more helpful because they provide more information about the topic, allow you to dig deeper into the purpose of the tasks and give you the opportunity to learn a lot more.

Each organisation and/or supervisor may have different expectations about how you should communicate an absence from work or if you’re running late, so this is something that you should ask them how they would like this communicated during your orientation to the internship.

However, there are some generally accepted rules about how to communicate with your supervisor about your illness or running late:

• It is not acceptable to call in sick or late after your start time

   

• Most supervisors will expect to receive a phone call if you are unwell or running late – a text message or email is not acceptable unless you have explicit instruction from your supervisor to notify them this way

   

• Email our team at hello@outcome.life to let us know if you are sick

   

• Make a note of your lateness/sickness in your logbook, who you have contacted and how you told them (e.g. phone, email, etc)

   

• If you are sick, make sure you get an official medical certificate from your doctor and send a copy to your supervisor and our team at Outcome.Life as soon as possible.