Introduction

This chapter explores the growing use of internships as a route into certain careers of choice. Although internships have been common practice in a few professions since the 1960s, such placements, typically unpaid, burgeoned during the years of the 2008–12 recession, becoming a widespread strategy deployed both by organizations to enhance their workforce and young people keen to enhance their CVs with work experience at a time when paid jobs were in short supply. This chapter argues, however, that internships, particularly during the years of the 2008–12 economic crisis, are a highly exclusive entry route scheme, powerfully structured by social class. They vary considerably in terms of quality, and it is, in the main, only those young people with family resources who are able to access and benefit from the most prestigious internships.

The chapter begins with an overview of the bifurcated discourse of internships. On the one hand, they are positioned as a valuable means by which young people can access muchneeded work experience to gain paid employment in a chosen career, but, on the other, they have come to be heavily critiqued as a highly exploitative means by which organizations enjoy talent for free. We then interrogate the policy landscape of internships, revealing this also to be a highly contested terrain that reflects the opposing discourses. Our case study of internships in London concentrates on a highly prestigious ‘blue-chip’ scheme accessed primarily by young, middle-class undergraduates from elite universities. This scheme is compared with the experiences of young people on other schemes that offer far less in terms of remuneration and work experience. Our research reveals that the young people with middle-class backgrounds enjoy contexts and institutions– such as family, their higher education institutions and the employing organization offering the internships– that ‘helicopter’ over their transitions. In contrast, for many young people from working-class backgrounds on other internship schemes, a ‘no-rescue’, ‘hands-off ‘ culture prevails.