I know it’s tough for students and recent grads. Thanks to my job, I know the difficulties my peers face while they make that transition from school to work.

Over the last two years, I never imagined myself being on the flip side of that situation or feeling compelled to comment on Gen Y entitlement. In general, I think it’s been discussed to death and usually consists of much Baby Boomer finger-wagging and head-shaking.

I am not a Baby Boomer. I’m Gen Y. I live and breathe everything Gen Y. I think we’re the most educated, skilled generation to date and, if we get our shit together, we could make the world an amazing place and make money while we’re at it.

But I’m starting to feel frustrated about Gen Y entitlement.

I’ve recently been interviewed by a few young journalists regarding my thoughts on unpaid internships because students are becoming frustrated by them.

To sum up, I don’t think they’re ideal, and in some cases they’re unethical, but they’re the reality of the current job market and to succeed in many industries you have to complete one or more unpaid internships.

I’m a realist. I’ve both completed unpaid internships and hired for unpaid internships as an employer. I try really hard to make TalentEgg’s internships, both paid and unpaid, as meaningful as possible. I don’t think unpaid volunteers should replace full-time paid workers on an ongoing basis, and I don’t think a company should live or die by its unpaid interns.

But this post isn’t about employers. It’s about interns.

Just because you complete a (paid or unpaid) internship with an organization does not mean it is obligated to hire you. This is why:

• If you don’t make yourself so valuable to the organization that it can’t live without you on a full-time, permanent basis, then I don’t think you deserve to be hired.
• If you haven’t demonstrated initiative, autonomy, innovation, vision, passion, and that you can be trusted with responsibilities that are core to the business (at the very least) during your internship, then I don’t think you deserve to be hired.
• If you can’t do your job as good as your manager can (or better!), then I don’t think you deserve to be hired.

Harsh? Maybe. But I would not hire someone who didn’t embody each of those qualities.

So far during my short career as a Gen Y manager and a manager of Gen Y, there has only been one intern who I would have begged my boss to hire; who I could trust with really important projects and tasks; who I knew was making the company bigger and better and stronger; who worked as hard as my colleagues and I, or harder.

We’ve had a lot of great interns. Amazing people. Good workers. I’m not putting them down by any means and I am so, so, SO grateful for all of their hard work.

But did they all have that THING I just couldn’t live without?  I don’t think so.

That THING doesn’t have a name, but I like to think of it as the perfect storm of skills and qualities. Each organization and each manager will have a different recipe for that THING (which is why different people and different kinds of people are successful at different organizations), but we know it when we see it because it is so rare that it hits us over the head and slaps us across the face with its awesomeness.

I did not demonstrate that THING at some of my past internships and I know this because no one asked me to stay. I didn’t demonstrate that THING because I didn’t really want to stay.

But I know I demonstrated it at TalentEgg because I went from intern to senior management very quickly, and I’ve maintained my position while I’ve watched many others come and go without making any significant contribution to the company’s culture, growth or bottom line.

A lot of students and recent grads ask my colleagues and I how to find an awesome job. We usually try to offer some actionable tips, but I think the truth is that you just have be remarkable.

Everyone has a degree or diploma, or two or three. Everyone has a resumé. Everyone has connections. Everyone has access to personal branding tools and social media. These things might help you find a job or internship, but they won’t help you keep it. Your behaviour and your work will.

Thoughts?

The older members of Generation Y, like me, have grandparents and parents who are self-made men and women as inspiration for their own success. As many Gen Y denouncers suggest as a flaw, when Gen Y was growing up we were told if we work hard enough there’s nothing we can’t achieve or obtain.

What they didn’t tell us, however, was that this depends on someone else noticing and appreciating our hard work.

My dad is the best example of a self-made man I can think of, and a big believer in this philosophy.

For years, he worked as a cable guy, and in mines and oil fields in northern Alberta and the territories. He went to trade school in the early 1990s to become an electrician and, although my parents had to file for bankruptcy shortly after, it was probably the best thing he ever did.

He worked as an electrician for years, hauling around a heavy tool belt, crawling into small spaces, handling tiny wires and spending weeks in the cold while working on projects in the winter. His work at the airport caught the attention of one of the largest car rental companies in North America and they created a position just for him: he became the facilities manager for all of Toronto.

After almost a decade there, he was offered the opportunity to defect to a competitor (another large car rental company) to oversee locations across the country.

Although there are stressful days when he wishes he was back doing manual labour for a living, he has a comfortable mostly-office job with an impressive salary, especially for someone who didn’t go to university or college. He also has lots of perks like a company car, free gas, plenty of vacation time, an assistant and the ear of the president of the company.

As an unmarried, childless twenty-something working hundreds of kilometres below the earth’s surface in a mine in the early 1980s, he probably had no idea what his career would look like at age 52. He could have followed almost any path.

Today, most young people attend college or university to obtain some kind of speciality and, honestly, some kind of direction or certainty as to which direction our careers will take.

But in today’s economy, many of us are facing the same uncertainty our parents faced at our age.

If there’s one thing I learned from my dad’s career path, it’s that I should work hard at any and every opportunity which comes my way in order to succeed, whether it’s the ideal project or position or not.

For example, when I was hired as a sales and marketing intern at TalentEgg last summer, I was happy to have a paying job at a great company after months of searching. But I was also disappointed I wasn’t able to land my dream journalism internship.

After all, isn’t that what I’m going to university for, what I’m paying tens of thousands of dollars for? Journalism, not sales and marketing.

But I sucked it up and hid my disappointment as best as possible.

I probably wasn’t the ideal salesperson and I had no formal marketing training, but I wanted to learn. And I discovered I was more interested in it and more capable than I thought. Besides, I really believed in the company and the people I worked with were great.

I’m not a one-trick dog and neither is anyone else.

I suppose I wasn’t such a terrible sales and marketing intern after all because Lauren, my boss and the president of TalentEgg, kept talking to me, and became a mentor and friend once I stopped formally working for the company and went back to school in September.

But I never stopped working. I offered to spend some of my time blogging and agreed to represent the company on related blogs and message boards. I made myself available as someone to bounce ideas off of and tried to communicate my genuine interest in the ongoing success of the company.

This week, Lauren offered me the opportunity to head up a new project at TalentEgg. I’ll provide more details once it officially launches. For now I’ll just say I’m extremely excited about it.

It’s creative. It’s online. It involves writing, editing and managing people. And it’s paid.

Although it’s earlier in the year, I find myself in the same position I did last spring. I’ve been applying for journalism jobs for months and haven’t been able to land anything.

The difference between this year and last year is I’m not disappointed to take this position. I’m fired up about it. It’s all I think about. I’m not just grateful for a job, any job, I’m starting one I love at a company I believe in and feel connected to.

I’ve worked hard at many things over the last year and TalentEgg was one of them. I didn’t expect anything out of it – I really wanted to do it. But Lauren noticed and now she’s placing value on my work.

More details about the project to come in the next week or two.

What has paid off for you once someone noticed how hard you were working?