- Thu Nov 17, 2011 12:40 pm
#451965
1. Is there evidence that charities aren't being offered these schemes? This was an initiative being offered at a retail open day, and if anything the placement/internship/scheme is something that will prove that the individual has the capability to work (or not) at a sufficient level within a retail environment
2. Most massive profitable companies get free labour through work experience, internships and placements. People are just in a twist because it's a floor jobs. I worked for 3 months being paid expenses (£5 for lunch, and £3 for travel as it was in central London), meaning I wasn't being given money - I was being recompensed. It's commonplace for this to happen. Also, having someone to fill in for up to 8 weeks doesn't fill a job for a company. They may want temporary staff occasionally, but the hiring process for filling a role (even as shelf stacker) for 2-3 years is expensive.
3. PR, advertising, marketing and most media agencies make their interns do things which aren't 'great training for work', but the key to a successful internship is making yourself as useful as possible, making a mark on your employer and creating work for yourself to impress. If you're too lazy to do that (and show no worth to the working environment), then you deserve to be binned off by the end of it. Giving people the chance to get initiatives like this on their CV is better than having a massive gap there- you always embellish the truth when it comes to what you did on an internship (B2C relations = took an old lady to the ketchup). Again, if they're not clever enough to play the game it goes a far way to explaining why they're losing.
4. This is the most annoying point. Just because you're a graduate, doesn't give you a divine right to be in a job that you have the academic skills for. If you're qualified for a job where the market is saturated, then you need to be able to stand out. You can't expect to walk in and say
'I have a geography degree, find me a related job'
'There aren't any, and graduate positions are very competitive at the moment'
'Oh, well I'll just keep looking for a job I deem suitable to my educational level in the meantime, bye!'
5.That's a fair point, she's been short changed to the tune of £300, which is indefensible. But that's a problem which has existed for years, and is only present in the UK. The issue is unpaid internships are allowed to continue, not that people are being told to partake in unpaid internships in generic, low level fields rather than do nothing. If she'd chosen to do that internship she'd have lost her JSA, and she would have been compensated about £120 (as pposed to the £150 in JSA), with no money to spend for herself as it would all be based on expenses.
All job markets are damn competitive now days, the reason for partaking in a scheme like this would be to improve the quality and diversity of the individual's CV, because presumably they're not good enough at the moment. A graduate has just as much reason to stack a shelf as a non-graduate.
I say this as a post-grad, and once I'd finished my Master's, there were no roles within Social Media/Advertising - the grad schemes were packed with people who were better qualified and more dynamic than myself. I started working freelance and made my own business, which brought in around the same as jobseeker's over the 3-4 months which I persisted with it (during which I couldn't claim jobseeker's because I was working) - then got an internship, and after 8-9 months of desperately trying i got a related job.
It's not easy, and it seems that some people are too spoiled to see that they may not be good enough to succeed in the way that they want to because there are people out there who are better than them, and they need to adapt to that fact and change their goals.
chrismoyles.net
