Unpaid Internship: The Corporate Scam?

Chances are, you’ve recently pondered over a hiring post in social media where the company was looking for ‘unpaid interns’ and you thought to yourself, ‘this sounds like a good opportunity, but should I really work for free?’ But then you took a good look at your resume and decided to ‘gain some experience’, applied & congrats, you are hired on your first job (!). And from then on, you can only hope for your time to be worthwhile while staring down at the barrel of a corporate gun.

So, this is me, staring right back up at you, who’s already traveled through the funnel, and hopes to guide you into choosing the right internship for your career.

“Gaining Experience” is overrated

First of all, you need to understand the hook of an unpaid internship. Everyone tells you that it is good because, “Hey, it’s better than just sitting at your home doing nothing, right? You get to ‘’gain some experience.’’ So, you do it, you spend months after months of your life, elevating a company that’s probably not even on google maps to fill the spaces of your CV. Just to say at your entry-level hiring, “ I worked for a company you don’t really know about, and they didn’t deem me good enough to pay me. Will you hire me now?” In fact, statistically speaking, unpaid interns end up in a much worse starting salary at their full-time job than interns/ part-timers who indeed were on the payroll.