How typical is it to only have your internship as your work experience

Okay, so, you’re asking a lot of different things at once. What you want your resume to look like (as an industry switcher or otherwise) is going to be different for business school applications than it is for specific jobs, and as bb pointed out on your other post, even for different jobs you might want to emphasize different aspects of what you’ve done. I’m gong to focus my response more on applying for internships or jobs.

If you only put the internship or work experience that is relevant to the career/industry you’re trying to switch into, people are going to wonder about what you’ve been doing with yourself for the other decade of your life you haven’t accounted for. But moreover, rather than trying to hide your previous career path, you can use your resume and cover letter as a chance to convince your potential employer why the experiences you’ve had are relevant to your new line of work. Maybe you don’t have experience with specific software or technical skills required for your new career path, but even for MBA internships, they’d like to see *some* office experience even if it’s in a totally different field. If you can frame what you HAVE done in a way that shows you’ve developed transferable skills like multitasking and organizational skills, communication and presentation skills, analytical big picture thinking, you want to emphasize that in your resume.

As a career switcher myself, I’ve sometimes lumped some of my less relevant jobs, especially freelance/contract work into one line on my resume and I haven’t seen any potential employers/schools have a problem with that. Something like “various consulting work, 2008-2012.” Then I’ll include my linked in profile on the resume, so if people want the full details so they can run a background check or just know more, it has like all 50 jobs I’ve ever had including half a decade of internships, etc, but I’m not wasting space on my resume.

I do think employers “buy” changing career paths, but only if you sell it right. That is, if you get to the interview stage and they ask why you’re switching at all, and why at that point in your life, you’d better have a believable answer. If you do, you should be good. That said, if you’re looking to get into finance/investment banking specifically, yes it’s going to be hard to compete with people who have already had the right internships in that field.

As for your last question…. Are you talking about resumes that you send in to companies during your MBA as part of on-campus recruiting? As opposed to resumes you just send out on your own, or the resume you send in to get in to the MBA initially? Because it seems like you’re worrying about the wrong thing here. If the company itself finds out that you ‘fudged’ some things, THAT has consequences, and not just if it gets back to the school.

When you get a job offer, the fine print usually says that it is contingent on a background check checking out, and/or on everything in your application being truthful. So when they do their checks, if they find out it’s not, they can indeed rescind your offer. If you’re talking fudging like…. you had a summer internship a decade ago in college and you don’t remember the exact dates so you say you stopped working there in August but it was really July, no, probably there will be no consequences. But if you “fudge” some basic facts that are easily verifiable, like what degrees you have, dates you were in school, jobs titles you’ve had, that’s a bigger problem.

And, yes, it could have consequences for you at the school, too. It’s important for business schools to keep good working relationships with employers. If a potential employer finds out that you outright lied or mischaracterized yourself, that reflects poorly not just on you but on your school, and the schools really want to avoid that. They want employers to *want* to recruit their students, not to question their ethical standards. That would be a major problem for the school, and yes, they could hold you accountable, not recommend you for future positions, etc.