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Internships are rapidly becoming one of the best ways to offer basic training to the young high school or college graduates. As well, using interns it is somehow beneficial for the companies as they do not have to offer them a normal salary. More than that, at the end of the internship, the companies will have already experienced workers, therefore the young graduates might want get a decent job after only 3 months of training and accumulating experience in the working field.

However, there is a bit of a misunderstanding in UK regarding the internship and the interns: UK managers seem to offer internships just to avoid spending more money on hiring experienced people. Moreover, after the internships come to an end (they can last from 3 months to 1 year), managers are not “forced” by law to hire them.

By taking a look at the statistics, we can see that about 17% of the UK managers are hiring interns just in order to pay less. However, 95% of the interviewed managers reported that the presence of the interns in their company was useful for their enterprise.

The sad part comes from the young graduates who are not aware of their working rights. According to the UK laws, unpaid internships are illegal, and can be punished even with jail sentences. However, some companies are still offering unpaid internships, as they promise a stable working place after the internship period expires.

According to the UK laws, the minimum wage for tasks that can be called “work” is £6.08 an hour. And even if there are some managers who claim that the internship itself can be considered payment, it is obvious that this kind of practice has to stop as it violates the UK laws and constitution.

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Even though the rumor mill speaks a lot of unpaid internships, interns that are placed to do only things that nobody likes to do, in reality, the situation is pretty much different.

Even though a lot of companies from UK (especially small ones) tend not to hire interns, as they do not have enough employees to give basic training and to deal with the interns, there are some companies (not just multinational companies) that are still offering internships for the  young high school and college graduates.

According to Mike Hill, chief executive of the Higher Education Careers Services Unit (HECSU), the rumor mill is by far inaccurate. That is mainly because, the small companies are always looking forward for hiring “fresh meat”, therefore hiring interns for a period of 3-6 months is definitely beneficial for the company, as right after the internship ends, interns can be hired full time, as they will have a tunnel vision upon most of the aspects from the company.

Moreover, even if not everybody from the companies is willing to say “yes” from the first time when it comes to an intern, most of the graduates who have passed through internships, as well as their bosses, claim that passing through such a period was a tough, but full of surprises experience, as they have learned to deal with problems they did not even hear about in the college or high school. And, as the minimum wage was somewhere near £200 per week (9 to five program, 5 days per week), being in an internship wasn’t a bad experience at all, especially that this kind of thing weighs heavily in a CV.

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