Professional awareness - evidence that you are aware of professional demeanor and communication skills in tone and pace as well as listening; they are looking for maturity that will integrate easily with the current staff.
Interpersonal skills and an effective participant in a teamwork environment - evidence that you can work well with others, that you have a supportive rather than competitive attitude in working with others; that you develop positive working relationships with co-workers as well as your supervisor.
Communication skills - that you have mastered the English language and can communicate both orally and in writing so others can easily understand what you intend to communicate; this also includes listening skills that are essential to understanding others and to following directions.
Positive attitude - that you bring a "can do" attitude to the workplace and are a source of positive energy.
Initiative - that you work with insight into the job and take initiative to excel in doing it; that you initiate ideas and reach out to help others and support their initiative to go beyond the basic acceptable performance.
Integrity - that you have a pattern of honesty and truth and do not compromise standards of excellence; that the employer can have confidence that you will adhere to expected standards or surpass them with your own standards of excellence and integrity.
Reliability - that you can be counted on to meet deadlines with quality performance; that you do what it takes to meet expectations (i.e. work late if necessary to make a deadline with high quality performance).
Confidentiality - that you know and understand what should be confidential and what it means to keep a confidence
Trustworthy - that you can be trusted with equipment and other business property; that you can be trusted with money and keys and access to resources
Seek out opportunities - that you ask for tasks or opportunities that you are ready and able to accept; a person with initiative, leadership potential and professional awareness does this; students who gain greatest value from the internship do this.
Self motivated - you maintain quality performance with little supervision.
Job task skills - while these are not listed in any priority order, job task skills are usually lower on the list of importance because most often these skills can be learned on the job while the others must be developed over time.
Do a personal assessment on your level of development in each of these categories. Be sure you have an accurate benchmark against which you are making your judgments. If you think you communicate really well, would your ideal intern employer agree with you? Use this worksheet to write out your personal level of development for each of these. It will help you as you consider what value you want to draw from your internship.