Commentary

Millennial Internships -- It's Time To Play Fair

It's that time of year when any marketer's desk will fill up with uninvited applications for work experience and internships -- only this time more than ever before, there's a responsibility to play fair with young people who are looking to get a break. Today's report in Marketing sets out the stakes. The capital is the most expensive city in the world, and yet so many millennials are supposed to get their lucky break by working for nothing or just expenses.

The result is pretty obvious. It has already happened in politics. If you want to get on you either have to be from London, and so can live at home for a few years, or you've got to come from a wealthy background. It has already happened in politics. It's no coincidence that just about all our leaders will typically have gone to one of three of four top public schools and have typically all "read" the same subject at one of two top universities before working as an unpaid advisor for a chum in parliament. So if we want marketing and advertising to be only for Londoners or those with rich parents, there is a simple honest and decent thing that everyone must do.

Interns have to be paid at least the minimum wage, and more ethically, the living wage -- and they need to actually be able to get something from an internship beyond filing and going on coffee runs. We all know the sort of positions and the types of company I'm talking about. Interns are frequently used as unpaid labour and are too scared to ask when their revolving status will ever turn into a real job -- or if they're going back to college, they dare not mention they can't pay next term's fees with "invaluable experience" that anyone else would give their right arm for. We all know this exists in all areas of communications, but it has to change.

I've been chatting about this to Ann Pickering, HR director at O2. Not only do the brand's internships give it a look into the millennial talent pool, but it also feeds back to managers how digital-first people act and behave. 

A case in point was a recent intake of interns who surprised Ann with their solution to the frequently asked questions that anybody has when they "onboard" at O2. "At the beginning of their placement, they noticed how many of the same questions kept popping up from other new joiners," she recalls. "Things like the location of different meeting rooms, the times of the shuttle buses that run between our head office and the nearest station, and the technical terms used frequently by other employees were all subjects of discussion. What they did next really exemplifies just what this tech-savvy generation is capable of. Rather than drafting a printed handbook or a list of FAQs, they developed a unique app called Discover. A fail-safe digital guide to life at O2, it’s now used by all new joiners during their first few weeks in the business, whether they’re an apprentice or a board director."

Of course, you only get this type of dedication, Ann insists, if you are prepared to live by three rules. First, you need to hire the right people and put as much effort in to selection as you would any other key role within a team. Second, you have to give them responsibility and trust them with projects. Third, and arguably the most important point, you have to pay them as an acknowledgement of what they have to offer and for the simple fact that it's shameful not to.

So the talk of London facing an exodus of talent may be a little premature -- and take it from an old timer, there's never been a time at which young people have enjoyed high pay in a thriving metropolis that happens to be incredibly cheap to live in.

That said, however, it's not hard to envisage that marketing and advertising internships become the preserve of the privileged -- and so to avoid the type of exodus forewarned in today's Marketing report, it's time to do the decent thing and offer interns a certain amount of responsibility for a living wage. As this becomes more and more of an issue, nobody is going to want to work at an agency that still keeps millennials on perpetual unpaid internships and, from a CSR perspective, clients are less likely to want to do business with companies with disreputable employment practices. 

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