Budget internships both good and bad

Without a genuine learning experience that provide (a) knowledge of the workplace; (b) knowledge of the working role of employees in the organisation; (c) an opportunity to begin networking with similar future employees; (d) a chance to practice under some supervision the future role for the intern's future career, such internships provide neither experience nor learning nor increased employability.

Internships that fail to provide a learning experience are merely an opportunity to exploit a young person, whereby a business takes advantage of the intern by paying a lower wage than would otherwise be the case. If the task involves work that would ordinarily be undertaken by a paid employee as a form of production rather than participant-observation then it is work that should be paid at an employees' rate, according to the Australian Fair Work Ombudsman.

Work-related learning of the kind offered by internship schemes that takes learning out of its traditional setting of educational institutions is based on a standard of trust: there needs to be trust-through guarantees and oversight-that the organisation will provide the hours, input and supervision necessary for there to be a genuine learning experience so that the intern takes away something more than a token payment. There also needs to be trust that an intern will engage with that learning experience by following instructions, appreciating the supervision, and taking the opportunity seriously as a chance to learn.

The fact that the participating business in the proposed PaTH scheme are paid up-front for their participation rather than subsequent to an assessment of the learning experience provided is a clear indication that the repercussions of this scheme have not been well-thought-out, and that there is a greater risk the program is one of exploitation rather than one of increasing young people's employability.

If the "language of learning" is absent from the debates and discussions on the value of the PaTH internship scheme, then there is clearly something other than providing an internship program going on.