Jobs few, college grads flock to unpaid internships (percentage, profit, employers)
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Not true. A summer internship is a three month long job interview. Often you give an intern a variety of tasks doing a variety of things, from important to mundane to see how they react so that you can have a good handle on the type of person they are. A person's personality, how they act, how they respond to situations, etc. is easily as important as technical, on-the-job skills.
The main point of an internship is to see if that person is someone you want to hire, if they gain project experience along the way, then that is nothing but a bonus.
I know at the internship I had at a tv station all the duties involved working in the newsroom and going out with reporters to assist during a story. There was no getting lunch or coffee which should only be if you are getting paid not unpaid or for college credit.
I know at the internship I had at a tv station all the duties involved working in the newsroom and going out with reporters to assist during a story. There was no getting lunch or coffee which should only be if you are getting paid not unpaid or for college credit.
I still don't think you understand the point of an internship. The internship is for the benefit of the company, not the intern. Interns really do not add value to a company, the effort spent training an intern is greater than the work they accomplish. The point of an internship is to determine if that person is worth hiring for a full time job. Every year I am instructed to give our interns some menial tasks, just to see how they react. Some interns act miserable and do nothing about it while others find something meaningful to do on their own and ask me if they can do that instead. The second type get full time jobs, the first don't.
I still don't think you understand the point of an internship. The internship is for the benefit of the company, not the intern. Interns really do not add value to a company, the effort spent training an intern is greater than the work they accomplish. The point of an internship is to determine if that person is worth hiring for a full time job. Every year I am instructed to give our interns some menial tasks, just to see how they react. Some interns act miserable and do nothing about it while others find something meaningful to do on their own and ask me if they can do that instead. The second type get full time jobs, the first don't.
Is that the case for summer internships for college credit? I figured since it's a summer internship for credit the purpose of the internship was to gain experience since the student could not be hired because of returning back to school in the fall.
Internships for college credit are usually a limited time thing like 3 months or the semester. It's fine. My daughter did that AND an unpaid internship after college when she was trying to break into her industry. She quit after 6 weeks because she "assumed" if she did good they would hire her but discovered 3-4 other unpaid interns who had been there for months. One nearly for a year. They weren't fetching coffee, they were doing the actual work at a graphics company so she took her experience and left.
Fast forward...she was looking for a job again and sent out lot's of inquiries and was offered another unpaid internship. She got a little sassy in her email reply about how she'd been working steady for 13 months for $$ an hr and was far beyond the "work for free" stage of her life. They ended up calling her in for an interview and hiring her for pay as a freelancer. Pays to not sell yourself short.
The alternative though is to just sit around. Then when the job market picks up, employers can put you in the same category as the rest of the long term unemployed, or maybe you take a job at some retail place making a dollar over minimum wage.
Might as well be the same for employers. When the economy finally turns around, they'll pass you over for the freshest crop of graduates, claiming your skills and knowledge have atrophied.
Well, that's the thing. There's no guarantee that the economy is going to turn around, or that employers are going to think that what you did do in the unpaid internship is going to make you good for their job. Is the overworked unpaid intern more likely to get hired than the person who sits around? Probably, but not more likely enough to be worth it, in my opinion.
Internships for college credit are usually a limited time thing like 3 months or the semester. It's fine. My daughter did that AND an unpaid internship after college when she was trying to break into her industry. She quit after 6 weeks because she "assumed" if she did good they would hire her but discovered 3-4 other unpaid interns who had been there for months. One nearly for a year. They weren't fetching coffee, they were doing the actual work at a graphics company so she took her experience and left.
Fast forward...she was looking for a job again and sent out lot's of inquiries and was offered another unpaid internship. She got a little sassy in her email reply about how she'd been working steady for 13 months for $$ an hr and was far beyond the "work for free" stage of her life. They ended up calling her in for an interview and hiring her for pay as a freelancer. Pays to not sell yourself short.
Good for her. We need more people like your daughter who are willing to stand up for themselves rather than the people who worked unpaid for a year holding onto a false hope.
Is that the case for summer internships for college credit? I figured since it's a summer internship for credit the purpose of the internship was to gain experience since the student could not be hired because of returning back to school in the fall.
I have been given a summer intern for two years now, and in the corporate world at least, it is true. We don't give college credit to our interns, so I cannot speak to that. We give job offers to about 60-70% of our summer interns We typically give out the job offers around October, with a start date of the next June, after the student graduates. If our intern program did not result in us hiring good employees, we wouldn't bother to run the program at all.
I know how cold this sounds, but why do I care if an intern who wouldn't end up working for the company gains experience?
I cannot understand the reasoning behind an unpaid internship. You are performing work. While you may be receiving training, you are still contributing. And the costs of training are far less than what many of these companies like to say. I think it is just a way to get around labor laws. I think it should be like a proper apprenticeship where you receive wages that are appropriate for your level of skill that are not below the minimum wage.
I know how cold this sounds, but why do I care if an intern who wouldn't end up working for the company gains experience?
That's corporate douchebag, sociopath behavior. People who are decent human beings care, especially about people just starting out in the work world. Those kids are underdogs, they don't have a lot of people in the work world who could help them.
Once again, you are showing your true colors. Unfortunately, too many MBA executive types have your callous d-bag attitude.
It's also Baby Boomer, I Got Mine, S**** You behaviour.
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