Skillset launches work experience guidelines to clamp down on unpaid placements

Skillset, the skills and training body for the creative media industries, has launched new guidelines for employers offering work experience to would-be journalists in a bid to encourage greater access to placements and a better quality of internship.

The guidelines, which have been produced in collaboration with Creative & Cultural Skills and Arts Council England, include recommendations on pay and expenses and working hours and are aimed at those over 19 years of age.

Work experience placements should not exceed 160 hours, when carried out full-time over a four-week period or part-time over three months, the guidelines recommend. Expenses during such placements should also be reimbursed, while employers should pay minimum wage to anyone on a graduate internship or carrying out the placement outside of further education or a training course, the guidebook suggests.

The rising number of students graduating from university and college journalism courses that feel obliged to work for little or no wage has made the industry group re-evaluate previous guidelines set out in 2007. Previous Skillset statistics collected in 2008 suggest that 44 per cent of the creative media workforce have carried out unpaid work to get into the industry.

"An oversupply of people wishing to enter the industry has resulted in the representation of the creative industries as being notoriously hard to break in to and a culture of low or unpaid entry positions," it says in the introduction to the Guidelines for Employers offering Work Placement Schemes in the Creative Industries booklet, which is embedded via Scribd below.

"Available roles often go to the few with the right connections, rather than those with the most talent and potential. Provisions should therefore be in place for promoting fair and equitable access to all entry routes, thereby opening them up to candidates from all backgrounds.

"Fair opportunities should exist for both people who wish to embark on a career and for those who wish to move on in their careers in the creative industries."

The guidelines set out the differences between volunteering, work experience as part of a training course, apprenticeships, graduate internships and student internships, and offer a checklist for employers to encourage best practice through the recruitment, induction and duration of the placement.

"The need for these guidelines is not just about preventing exploitation. It is also about ensuring our industries are open to everyone with the talent and determination to work within them - not just those whose parents can afford to support them through long unpaid internships," says Jeremy Dear, general secretary of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) who sits on Skillset's publishing skills council, in a comment piece for Journalism.co.uk on the issue of unpaid work experience.

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