The " Intern " Era !

A new word has entered the lexicon as young Australians try and bridge the gap between ending school and finding their first paying job.   That word is " Intern " and it holds the promise of " on the job " training with the prospect of the intern gaining permanent employment at the conclusion of that intern period.

The target was to enrol  120,000 vulnerable young Australians and in the 2017-18 year it attracted 56,433 participants and of these 2918 moved to permanent employment when their intern period ended.   The programme was termed PaTH and its cost to the taxpayer was $840 million.

PaTH certainly had impressive ideals.  The idea was to match young Australians with prospective job opportunities by providing an incentive for businesses to take them on and evaluate the skills they could provide.   The incentive for business was that the cost of employing these interns was heavily subsidized, enabling them to increase their workforce at little direct cost.

The intern period was negotiable and the business received a grant of one thousand dollars for each intern they agreed to train, and they were absolved from paying wages for the fifty hours a fortnight the intern would spend on the job.   For the intern, this arrangement delivered a payment of $200 each fortnight in addition to whatever Centrelink payments they were receiving.   It was a " win win " arrangement that should have delivered happy outcomes.

That the results achieved were meagre could be attributed to deficiencies on both sides.  Some interns were less than impressive in their job punctuality and performance, and some employers saw the scheme as a way of obtaining cheap labour, with no intention of increasing their workforce.   In one instance a business successively attracted seventeen interns over a period of time, without offering even a single permanent job opportunity.

The term " internship " is relatively new to Australia and it originated in America.  In fact it is one of the perks of government there when politicians grant internship to the children of favoured citizens who often then go on to a rewarding career in government employ.   The term became familiar here when Monica Lewinsky's internship led to a disastrous relationship with president Bill Clinton.

We are heading into an election year and both the government and the opposition will shortly present their plans for consideration by the voters.  There is obvious value in a scheme where job seeking young people gain an opportunity to show their skills and " slot in " seamlessly to the workforce of an employer who could gain from enhancing that business.   It offers employers the opportunity to evaluate potential staff before risking the unknown of simply advertising and recruiting when additional people become a necessity.

Making taking on an intern a valuable opportunity for both the job seeker and the employer has mutual benefits and needs rethinking in how it is presented to both sides.  Obviously interns need to extol their virtues to a prospective employer and job opportunities need to be genuine.  Whatever the outcome of the coming  election, this is an outcome that needs nurturing and expanding on a sensible basis to increase job opportunities for young people.