We’ve come to accept working for free as completely normal. It's fair to say that there's an expectation graduates to spend the weeks, months or even years after university traipsing from one unpaid internship to another and somehow still manage to exist in a world where, funnily enough, nothing else is free. And while experience is invaluable, and many brilliant work experience placements do offer payment, expenses or otherwise, there’s real longevity to the consequences that come from working your bum off for no money.
When we're slogging away doing the shit jobs as the intern, the mantra that's most often fed to us is that 'it'll pay off in the long run'. We enter into this murky area of contactless employment in order to get our proverbial feet in the door under the unconfirmed premise that it'll put us ahead of everyone else who doesn't bother with interning for free. But a six-year study of tens of thousands of students has found that's not exactly the case.
A study by the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex has found that, contrary to the way many of us assume it'll work out, three years after graduating, the majority of ex-students doing unpaid internships will actually be worse off than those who went straight into a paying job. Bloody bitter pill to swallow if you're reading this on the way home from a shitty shift you're now apparently doing for fun, I know.
The career progression of tens of thousands of students was examined as part of the first study of its kind, and it revealed that three and a half years into post-graduation 'adult' life, those who had spent time working as an unpaid intern earned £3,500 less than those who went straight into a job and £1,500 less than those who went on to do postgraduate study. It sounds insane, but essentially if you want to put a number on it, unless you're fortunate enough to have a shit load of savings or parents who are able to support you through your placements, doing an internship to get ahead is probably going to end up costing your salary £3,500. Great.
In continuation of this fantastically unencouraging news, it was also found that those who took internships were less likely to progress to professional or managerial roles, or even be satisfied with what they were doing, the Guardian reported. Dr Angus Holford, who carried out the study, said that the reason for this huge difference in earnings could be because the delay that came with taking internship could essentially see graduates ending up on different career paths than the ones started on work placements, thus pushing the timeline for progressing up the ladder back a bit.
‘If you are not able to find a job straight away, you’ve missed the graduate intake, that boat has sailed and you are left behind', Holford told the Guardian. 'If you take a while to get promoted you might be a little bit behind. Or you might get side-tracked into a different career trajectory’.
You'd be forgiven for thinking everyone is screwed. We're stuck in a system where for some reason it's totally okay for graduates to work without pay (which under many circumstances is actually illegal, btw) under the guise of fruitful career progression when in actuality that's never been a guarantee. It's a shame because internships are incredibly valuable and really *can *set you up for a really great career, but the huge blow that comes with the fact that doing all of these unpaid internships might mean you'll be earning less than those who didn't bother in the long run, is that there's little to no wiggle room to work out what you want to do.
We're already under enough pressure to know where we want to go and who we want to be as soon as we step foot outside of the university bubble. And while work experience placements have often been as much an opportunity to try a career on for size as they've been a means to get into a company, it seems that even taking unpaid internships may soon become a 'luxury' that we'll never be able to afford.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.