The human face of internships

By Rosy Rickett and Alex Try

For anyone hoping to crack the graduate job market, times are tough. For those hoping to work in politics, journalism, PR, graphic design, the arts, NGOs, think tanks, they’ll probably have to spend at least 6 months working for free to have any chance of success.

We set up Interns Anonymous as a campaigning website in March this year. The site is an archive of experiences – people send us anonymous accounts of their internships and we post them up for all to see.

This short documentary provides a human face to an issue often overlooked both by lawmakers and employers unwilling to “pay for something that is available for nothing”.

In a series of interviews interns talk about their highs and lows, how they afford to work for free, what they did, the ways in which internships restrict social mobility and alternative systems to those that operate in the UK.

With a million young people currently unemployed and a growing number of indebted out of work graduates, the UK’s intern culture needs to be interrogated.