Internships at VP

The problem is even the ones that pay are more and more asking for a ridiculous level of expertise and skill for the amount they pay. Especially if it's for a company that has some kind of prestige factor to it something football clubs especially use to take the piss. I've seen way too many internships for social media managers being advertised not just for Football clubs but also by the likes of media companies that either offer no pay or a nominal amount that require experience in

• Photoshop & Indesign
• Premier Pro
• Videography
• Photography
• HTML
• PHP & MySQL

While also wanting experience in running successful social media accounts on most of the top platforms. All while requiring 20-30 hours a week and usually requiring a 12-24 month commitment

Just one of those skill requirements should be at the very least a Full-Time paid Junior role not an internship, All of them is just taking the piss. Having all those things even at a lower level makes you immensely employable and they are just being scummy by using their 'prestige' to get people who are over qualified to be getting no pay or nominal pay to work for them.


Mind you it's not new especially when the market has allowed it. When I graduated Uni in the early 2000's it was into the middle of the 1st dot.com bubble bursting. A combination of first the millennium bug and then the dot.com boom had created a massive amount of jobs in IT that paid well so you had alot of people moving into it from other sectors looking to make good money and also had schools/colleges pushing people into Comp Sci degrees. So with both of those sets of jobs having gone and so many people in the industry and so many coming out of the education system each year the market was flooded. So much so that I went to a number of interviews, which in the coding space are often a bit like the Final 5 interviews on the Apprentice where they get a bunch of you down for the day, they have multiple rooms, one which is usually a standard interview, another which is a quick fire question and answer interview thats tests your knowledge, another that is getting you to solve a logic and/or maths puzzle and then a couple of of rooms with different coding tasks. When you aren't one of those in the rooms you are all sitting in a waiting room where you can't (and don't want to) discuss what's going on in each room so you just get to know each other and it wasn't uncommon for an entry level job to have multiple people with 5-10 years experience in the field going for these jobs as people were desperate for anything while they waited for the industry to recover. So entry level jobs were going to experienced people and many of the IT/tech companies started creating more internship jobs for the people they would usually hire into junior roles out of uni.

Now I was bouncing between signing on and temping, often not in IT roles themselves but in IT/tech companies hoping that it might help me get my foot in the door. Just before Christmas I got a week working for famous phone manufacturer , I got paid just under £300 for the week and while it was one of the more technical temp jobs I got I was still just doing the basic stuff deemed too basic for the Intern they had. They actually asked me if I would be interested in taking up an internship role to help out and before I gave them a decision I talked to the intern. They were paying him a month HALF what I got for a week of temping. I would have had to spend almost all of that on train fares to get there as it worked out at under £8 a day they were paying so I turned it down as I couldn't commit to that 2 years. Which is just an example of how companies like to abuse internships for free or cheap work that if they weren't labelling it an internship they couldn't legally get away with. And now it doesn't even need the market to create the right conditions now it's just the norm if you have any kind of prestige. Either that or they do what the likes of Tescos do and abuse those on JSA to get workers for 6 months on job placement schemes where they aren't paying for them where if they really did need them they should be advertising paid roles in the Job Centre for these people to apply for rather than having the Job Centre bully people into doing them just so they don't lose their JSA (Which is counter productive because they rarely have any intention to hire these people but its 6 months where you are working so many hours you don't have the time to look for other work and even if you did you don't have the flexibility to goto interviews because you are only allowed to miss a certain number of days before you will get sanctioned and lose you JSA for weeks or months)