Obviously, an internship experience can be of great benefit to both the intern and the organization or community being served. In recent years, many colleges and universities have initiated and heavily promoted “service-learning” opportunities for their students (Jacoby, 2003). Some of the pull toward postgraduate internships undoubtedly can be attributed to this pregraduate emphasis on the value of service-learning work. We must be careful, however, about offering too much encouragement and offering too much support to those people who are opting for an internship rather than paid work. Non-payment for work is not the answer to our current economic/employment challenges. We must fit internships into a variety of career paths that interweave learning opportunities and the “pilot testing” of specific jobs and careers with sustained and fully-compensated work in a chosen vocation. Professional coaches can certainly play a key role in helping someone venture along this multi-strategy career path. Coaches can specifically provide valuable counsel and support for the young person (or person in mid-life) who is at a choice point regarding the use of an internship to yield new learning, provide greater meaning in life, and/or help build a stronger resume.

The Shattered Covenant

Life in the organizational underground is filled with hope and opportunity—once an inhabitant examines the available options (with the assistance of a professional coach). This life, however, is also filled with a sense of hopelessness and loss—even a sense of betrayal (what we are calling the “shattered covenant”).

Identity and career

Sheldon Stryker, Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Indiana, took the basic premises of symbolic interactionism and applied them to the concept of identity. In his 1968 article, “Identity Salience and Role Performance,” Stryker outlined five axioms of using generalized symbolic interactionism. Later symbolic interactionists added concepts to the theory, most notably new types of identities beyond the role identities supported by Stryker (1968). The first is social identities or identities that are equated to membership in a particular group, such as racial, ethnic, or class identities (Burke, Owens, Serpe, & Thoits, 2003). The second identity type, personal identities, consists of personal characteristics, such as stubborn, intelligent or trustworthy (ibid.). Burke argued that these identity types (role, social, and personal) could be viewed as “isomorphic, but having different bases or sources.”

Burke and others continued to contribute to symbolic interactionism in the 1980s and 90s by presenting evidence that individuals resist changes to the self both in which identities they hold and the meanings associated with those identities (Burke & Stets, 1999). This work led to the identification of the self-verification process, wherein actors test the personal meanings of their active identities against the meanings in social contexts and then work to correct discrepancies (Burke et al, 2003). Discrepancies between internal meanings and social meanings often lead individuals to feel insecure and unhappy resulting in a lower self-esteem (ibid.). It is important for us to recognize the impact that lower self-esteem triggered by recession has had on our society.