Life-long internships
While I am a freelancer, for many reasons I still like to work as a part-time employee. Part of it is that I enjoy being a part of a team and being able to get to know the company and shape its visual identity in a longer perspective gives a different kind of satisfaction than completing a one-time assignment. This is why, from time to time, I still look for graphic design positions, especially those part-time, where I see the opportunity for longer term engagement.
Having done that over the last few years, I noticed that in graphic design discipline (and even more in communications) an unpaid internship is the most common “employment”. It is not only small businesses but also huge companies and organizations that continue having the graphic design, SoMe campaign and all kinds of similar tasks from this category, done by free work force.
I always thought well of the Danish “unemployment culture”, in which your internship ( called “virksomhedspraktik” or “løntilskud”) gets covered or supported by the government and even is arranged with the help of a local unemployment office (jobcenter). This makes it broadly used, because it is so easy and seems beneficial for all parties. In general, this is a great chance to activate the unemployed, give them an opportunity to build a network and experience, way better to be an intern than an unemployed. A win-win situation for all.
But is it really so?
During the years of looking into job market here in Copenhagen, I came to realize that many companies have an internship position as a permanent position in their company, never really employing any of their interns. It seems they could really use the full time employee for this work, instead they save up by having it done by externally paid or unpaid interns.
Is it good or bad?
This is a common practice to have plenty of interns in a sister field of architecture, where having an internship in a well-known office is often a gateway to the career for a young architect. So most of the big and known offices and smaller design studios continue having interns as a permanent placements, offering long spring and summer internships, which can be used as a part of the study curriculum or a real-life training after graduation. But in this case, they offer real training — an opportunity to learn from seniors and talk to experienced people, work together with a team on real projects. It is a great value when you are at the beginning of your design journey. And most of all, they really do employ some of their best fitting interns.
So what are those permanently offered unpaid positions in all kinds of other sectors, where they do not even have an employee on a similar position to learn from? And by the way, they would never think of having one.
Clearly, this is not a win-win.
Because neither you nor anyone ever will be offered an employment in the filed of that internship there. They just continue endlessly replacing one intern with the next one getting their job done for free.
It would be honest to admit that most companies today need at least a visually skilled communication person on a permanent collaboration basis. We are in the visual and digital age. And while many already acknowledged that they need this kind of work to get done, as it brings them value, they didn’t yet recognise that this work has value itself and yes, it should be paid too.
I just can’t stop thinking how unfair it is to always ask for these tasks to be done for free. I am not judging those who actually agree to do that, hoping it may bring them closer to their dream job. Hoping for that, they probably actually get the internship concept right.
But maybe they don’t?
I look to Wikipedia, to double- check that.
Internship:
“An internship is a period of work experience offered by an organization for a limited period of time. (…) They are typically undertaken by students and graduates looking to gain relevant skills and experience in a particular field. Employers benefit from these placements because they often recruit employees from their best interns, who have known capabilities, thus saving time and money in the long run.(…) The system can be open to exploitation by unscrupulous employers. (…) The lack of standardization and oversight leaves the term “internship” open to broad interpretation.”
Can we think of making more precise guidelines and maybe even rules in the field of unpaid internships, to make it really beneficial and not exploitative?