Summary
For many graduates an internship has become the default route to full-time, paid employment. But getting a good placement is competitive and in some cases poorly paid or unpaid. What does this mean for social mobility and diversity in the workplace? Evan Davis and guests discuss the pros and cons of internships.
GUESTS
Sarah Churchman, UK Head of Inclusion, Diversity and Wellbeing, PwC Amalia Illgner , Freelance journalist and a former intern Oliver Sidwell, Co-founder, Rate My Placement
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello, welcome to the podcast. In the 2015 film, The Intern, Robert De Niro is an aged widower |
| 0:12.0 | who manages to get an internship at a disorganised young start-up company. He doesn't |
| 0:16.7 | really fit in at first with his old school attache case and the like, but his gentle manner, |
| 0:20.9 | persistence and wisdom shine through, and he soon becomes a valued counsellor to the confused |
| 0:25.5 | CEO, and he's a father figure to the other employees. It all ends happily. Experience never gets old, |
| 0:31.8 | is the strap line. Well, needless to say, that's not the typical internship. That's the Hollywood one. |
| 0:37.7 | And we thought today we might look at the role of interns more generally, how internships should work and how they sometimes fail. |
| 0:46.2 | They have developed in recent decades, frequently now used as part of the recruitment process. |
| 0:52.0 | Internship is almost a form of probation. |
| 0:55.6 | So let's examine why it's caught on and how it can be abused. Well, I have three guests who can speak about the pros and |
| 1:00.9 | cons. Let's meet them now. First off, Oliver Sidwell, co-founder of a website, Rate My Placement. |
| 1:06.9 | And what is Rate My Placement, is a jobs and reviews platform that helps students learn all about internships and what roles they can do. |
| 1:15.8 | Right. So I would go on to your site if I'm looking for one. I'll find them advertised there. |
| 1:20.3 | Correct, yeah. |
| 1:21.2 | And what about the rating side of it? |
| 1:23.1 | We're effectively the trip advisor for placements and internships. |
| 1:26.4 | So we started Loughby University, |
| 1:29.2 | did placements ourselves, myself and three co-founders, and we had very mixed experiences. |
| 1:34.2 | We felt there's a bit of information gap in the market to help educate ourselves and our peers |
| 1:39.2 | around internships and what they're like. So when we finished our placements, we set up the website to help people following in our footsteps. Right. And actually, this is 12 years ago or something, isn't it? Correct. It obviously going well enough that it's kept you employed since then. Indeed. Yeah, there's now a team of 50 of us. 50 of you. 50 people. So on the website, the ratings come from the people who went through the internship last year. |
| 2:02.7 | They'll say, oh, it was hopeless. We had nothing to do or whatever. |
... |
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