Your thoughts on unpaid internships? Slave labour or needs must?

[FrancesMumsnet]

Hello. We've been asked by the folks at InternAware for your comments, experiences and thoughts about unpaid internships, the system where young people work for free, sometimes for extended periods, in return for something to put on their CV - and maybe a foot on the first rung of their chosen career ladder.

InternAware are worried about the financial toll this system is taking on family life. They say 37% of interns complete 3 or more internships (European Youth Forum survey) and, as most
unpaid internships are based in London (where living costs are high), a single typical three-month internship could end up costing a much as £3000.

If you'd like to, you could sign InternAware's letter to Nick Clegg, which calls on the government to do something to help families struggling to help their children get a job. (Clegg, if you remember, said last year that "internships have been the almost exclusive preserve of the sharp-elbowed and the well-connected", and that they should be paid).

But most of all, we'd be interested in hearing your thoughts: do please post them here.

I don't think that are slave albour, slavery involved people being forced into it.

However I think they are completely wrong as they are a nail in the coffin of social mobility as WF says; I see them all the time for charities (my sector) and I am both better qualified and better experienced than pretty much anyone I know in my tiny yet significant field, but I can't even consider applying for one, not if I want to eat or have a roof over my children's heads.

Likewise workfare which people have suggested- not only did the Government quite openly admit there would be collaterel damage from this and the new disability systems of which we'd likely be a part*, I believe it should be paid at minimum wage, if they really wanted to motivate people into work rather than make profits for their buddies who own the big companies, they would do that becuase a real wage is obviously the real motivator.

*collaterel damage- with the rejigging of the system there is a chance that as a Carer I will be made to do workfare once universal credit comes in; as someone with 3 disabled kids and no outside help, my hubby would have to give up his actual paid JOB to care for them. Sensible that.

I think graduates should be bright enough to realise that sectors where employers are finding it very easy to fill unpaid internships are not sectors where you want to work as these are clearly employer's markets. They are therefore a very useful indicator. As far as I'm aware, sectors such as media, advertising, fashion, music and politics are notorious for it. 'dull' professions like accountancy and engineering less so,
There's a lesson in there.

Am loving that some people think anyone can just move away

Because life is like that. No graduates are disabled of course, my mate who is about to graduate and has severe cerebral palsy is simply a figment of my imagination. No grads have families, parents to care for, existing part time jobs that pay the rent if nothing else oh no. And it is easy to move 200 miles and pay moving costs / flat deposit etc for your first job I'd bet.

We moved a significant distance for me to study, I can't say it's been a mistake as I have loved that, but I am not sure I would repeat it either- as life has developed for us having no family close by and increasing ties here has proved a massive block to many things. Now the boys are in SNU schools we simply cannot move. I am not unique, there are many with equal of better reasons to stay put in their areas I am certain. The Mum I know whose hubby is facing redundancy but can't move for a decade without paying the council £40 grand for adaptations made for their disabled child, for example. Shit happens, factor it in when making wide pronouncements about what people should do.

richman the problem with that though, is that certain industires with heck of a lot of powere and influence are over run with a certain type of person.

If only the DC of rich parents can get into politics and the media, can that really be a good thing?

RichMan would you want to choose to take a job you'd be bored in? I mean, anyone can make that shift later on- if you can afford an internship you can also afford an MA after all.

I did my degree and MA after a decade in my sector, and I can assure you I am ill equipped for accountancy and engineering; I have the spatial awareness of a dead raccoon, for a start! DS1 plans on a career allied to fashion but because that's where his real talents lie, they are not in accountancy- although he does plan on self employment, following the model set by my Dh who used that to get into a competitive and desirable sector. As it happens his has ASD as well and would make a really shit employee, but an excellent and driven own boss.

Word- I agree but crappy pay goes beyond internships in the glamorous professions so there's always going to be the issue that they'll be dominated by people who don't really have to worry about saving up a deposit on a starter home. Will always be the case as its simple supply and demand- more people want to be an ad man or columnist than an actuary.

Peachy- fine but if you want to do glamour then you have to accept the reality of being on the wrong side of a supply - demand equation so maybe the unpaid internship is a good reality check

richman now that is true.

Publishing and the media are full of the nouveau pauvre .

Yes Richman lets all encourage our DC to ignore the fields they are talented in, and become accountants, even when they are barely average in the likes of Maths..

1000s of Accountants and Engineers that's what we need, leave the artistic stuff to the better off

Actually, I met an aquaintance the other day who told me her newly graduauted son wanted to 'get into music journalism' and I smiled to myself.

Well we need engineers a damn sight more than we need more ad execs. Very interesting article in time magazine this week about how rising fuel prices could lead to a resurgence in local manufacturing for which we need engineers.

Richman i can hear what you're saying, but some people just aren't cut out to be engineers and that's that.

Well word if the mum can afford an Internship who knows.. that's the point isn't it?

Richman - many people seem to think journalism is glamorous (not entirely true) yet it used to be a trade with an apprenticeship - local paper and NCTJ. Now it seems to be graduate/post-graduate and internships. This is a step backwards.

Totally agree but I guess what I'm saying is that pervasive unpaid internships are a massive red flag to anyone planning to enter x sector as they're indicative of a demand/ supply imbalance in the labour market in that sector. If you choose to go ahead regardless you need to be sure that you're the dog's bollocks because being in say, the top 5 percent of wannabes is the only way to make a decent living. Most kids don't get very good career advice and many don't really understand pay differentials at a time when they're making critical decisions about their future.

I actually agree with you Richman.

But!

Creative jobs aren't always as glamorous as advertising or music journalism. Large numbers of creative professionals are working in less mainstream areas of arts and cultural delivery because it's their passion and they're good at it. And we need the experience and skills of these organisations - without them we wouldn't have the lighting and sound guys, the set designers, the choreographers, the designer-makers, the orchestra managers, the stage managers, the outreach managers, the directors, and practitioners who make things like the Olympics opening ceremony possible.

This sector is absolutely an employers market, but in these times, when organisations are trying to engage in meaningful and relevant programming with vastly reduced funding, it can simply be a case of bums on seats. When you have a limited amount of money to spend on personnel, an intern is a free administrator.

It's not right but it's a fact.

true Rich

But there are many other careers in that group- my sector is charity, autism in particular; there is no mo0ney and lots of redundancies in the sector but the roles are damned well needed.

I am far from the fogs bollcks I know 9anyone my age who thinks they are that needs help tbh!) but I am very good at what I do, I plan to return to work next year but when I look there just are not the jobs to apply for. Equally there is a verys trong shortage in the field of qualified people; it's a funding gap, as opposed to an over subscription gap IYSWIM. Actually in my local paper there have been 2 jobs in 3 weeks advertised; none in engineering either, one in care home work with an enforced HP agreement on a compoany car that woudl ahve cost me more than I could have earned in petrol and loan repayment (a growing scam apparently- when I did it at twenty opur travel was covered, not these days, and I have friends doing it who spend 3/4 of their allocated time going between appointments and only end up being paid 3 hours a day and having to fund a car and petrol) and a sales job for the paper; trust me I would be bloody awful at that!

As a mature person there are options I can pursue such as self employment and contacts who may offer me opportunities when ic an return to work next eyar, but I pity people who are younger or less specialist.

I got the experience I ahve btw by starting in a role that is now filled by an intern; the job DH had before starting his business is now taken by people on workfare scheme and tweeted about by the DWP- no thought for the people who previously held those jobs of course.

LMAO at glamour BTW!

I am the person who walks into a family whose lives have collapsed and pulls them back up, the woman who isn;t daunted by the massive meltdown going on in front of her and the person who can talk someone out of suicide but can't remember what day it is.

Me and glamour are in no way linked. It just does not happen! It might seem like it but it has been as much about digging people out of their pizza box covered hell as any of the fancy charity do side of it. I;d gladly ditch teh fundraising part if it were possible but we had to raise our salary as part of our job. I CAN do a radio interview but i'd rather run a group for depressed carers.

And I know I am doing the multiple postingt ing but....

as someone said glamourousjobs are rarely what they seem.

DH specialises in stage and lighting design; it's glam, he's mates with a lot of people doing the olympics cermonies but couldn't apply as we had a hoispital appt- he can spend hours designing fancy lighting shows using the latest etchnology and equipment....

and a lot more hours cutting lighting gels to size for the sales side, doing up his accounts or just sat on the bed upstiars trawlinng ebay etc for cheap equipment eh can do up and sell on.

I tell people what he does and they say ooohhhhh.... they haven't got a clue! But it's the sales and repairs that are the bread and butter of the industry- adn dare I say it, the transferable skills too (the qual being a BSc in electrical engineering)

I'd agree many young people don't get good careers advice. Mate of mine does some lecturing to media studies students and from her account many of them don't have a clue about just how bright eyed and bushy tailed they'll have to be to actually get a job. I think it's even harder now than when I trained, and it was hard enough then.

We could do with a lot more engineers and scientists in this country. We have a manufacturing sector that is only 10% of our GDP, Germany and Japan have a manufacturing sector of ~25% of GDP, we should be able to get more people into these industries. As RichMan has pointed out, and as I said earlier, these industries do not use unpaid graduate internships, in fact we pay students to work for us because the extended interview of a year in industry is worth a fortune for us. They do valuable work, and if we can train students to do valuable work in a high tech industry that requires people to use complex equipment and have the ability to analyse the data generated then I'm sure someone working in the arts sector can also be trained to do some of the basic entry level work required. The big advantage for us is we save a lot on advertising and interviewing for jobs because so many of these students come back after their degrees, and we tend to then get graduates that are reasonably loyal to the company since we gave them their first leg up.

And sure, not everyone is capable of being a creative engineer or scientist but we have lots of office based staff that do our documentation (I work in Pharms, there's a lot of documentation!) that also get long term well paid jobs with training that allows them to progress if they are good. You can work in a good industry without having the headline job.

There's something in either 'Delusions of Gender' or 'Pink Brain, Blue Brain' about how the States and the UK actually have less women in certain well paid sectors (engineering being the obvious one) because there is a bigger societal emphasis here than in other countries on 'being fufilled' by your career. If you see your work as the be all and end all then women end up in fluffy badly paid 'feminine' jobs. If you see it as a way of paying bills and giving you the freedom to live the life you want you get more women in highly paid careers. Something to think about when giving your daughters career advice?

Just wondering louisian what exactly do you consider to be a 'fluffy badly paid feminine job' ?

That doesn't make sense to me, Lou - surely if people were looking for fulfillment in their work we'd see more women doing interesting jobs? Surely it's just seeing your work as purely a wage slip that makes people go into boring jobs (or the City)?

I posted earlier saying id come back, and here i am.

This (school year) i have been doing a sandwich year (my degree is Fashion Design) getting just over a thousand pounds for the year and £600 tuition fee's. The rules for the year being i have to complete XX number of weeks, (i forget now, i think it was around 30) and do 6 assignments throughout the year. This was an optional year and around 10 people opted to do it. Out of those 1 person was paid. I worked for a big house hold name, and a small Independent brand, i designed clothes that were in magazines, on celebrities and on the telly. Yes, sounds great, however it wasn't, the bigger company had me doing really menial tasks, and the smaller company had me doing everything even accounts. I learnt so much in my year, it was from March last year till May this year with a 10 week break for having my DD. i really recommend doing it.

If you are a lone parent, or have rent/bills to pay, you quite simply won't be able to live. Student finance wouldn't even fund my nursery fee's. Without the support of my family i 100% couldn't have done it. Some area's are so competitive that its unknown for people not to have work experience, which is such a shame. As i do feel, its a majority of rich kids bankrolled by mummy and daddy living in London for a year working at a Design house 1 day a week. Very true.

It has been for me needs must, in the end i was offered a job in my Industry through a contact i had made whilst on my Work experience. Only good things came from my year. But i feel Interns should be paid at least minimum wage!

Internships are extremely popoular and important in my sector (non-profit, cultural sector). I started in an internship and I now offer them. I believe they should NOT be outlawed, however we try to be as ethical as possible.

We are not in London, so that isn't an issue, we're in a university city and mostly get interns who already live in the city or who have been living here for university.
We always advertise our opportunities on all the relevant professional listserves and have a fair and open recruitment process. I prefer to get our interns from post-graduate courses as a 'placement' so the student gets course credit for it, however at interview i would not discriminate and would take a non-student or graduate with the relevant experience.
Interships are for around six weeks usually, and we keep them at about 20hrs a week so that interns can maintain a part-time job, most are students or recent graduates who have part-time casual work already. I always make the hours as flexible as possible to allow paid work alongside.

Interns only do work that we could not do otherwise (in the not-for-profit culture sector there's always more we could do if we had more staff). They have job descriptions and learning objectives and we try to give them as many career development opportunities as possible. I believe they are 100% worthwile for the interns.

Bringing in minimum wage rules in my sector would mean hundreds of people wanting a way into the sector being kept out.

But outlawing working for free would also mean tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of volunteer museum staff being stopped from doing what they love and choose to do for free in their spare time and many museums and national trust properties and other cutural and heritage venues closing down.