After getting full-time employment, you’ll need to apply for a work permit. A work permit is a photo identity card issued by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). It is also called an Employment Authorization Document or EAD.
To work beyond your OPT, you need a highly competitive work visa – referred to as the “H1B visa”. Under special circumstances, you may qualify for other visas, but such circumstances are so rare that we don’t discuss them in this article.
H1B visas are applied for by employers and you cannot personally apply for them. This means you need to have a job offer from a company that is willing to sponsor your H1B visa (it has nontrivial fee and is subjected to regulations by the US government.). Few complications are involved such as H1B visas are issued only for some job categories where the government feels enough local American workforce is not sufficiently skilled or available. For example. while H1B visas are easily issued for software programmers, they are not for marketing or HR roles – this is one reason why more foreign students go for Computer Engineering than let’s say MS in Marketing. So, while a lot of Marketing jobs may be available in the US, it is not necessary that companies will hire international students (who require H1B visas) for these positions. Usually, if a company cannot sponsor an H1B visa in the future, they also don’t offer internships to those candidates even though internships do not require H1B. In short, you need to understand that: