Internships: the new holy grail of professional integration

Internships have become a necessary step to get a first job. In a labor market in crisis, students are asked to accumulate a maximum of experience and professional skills to be employable quickly. But since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, this internship race has hit a wall. During the first confinement, around 250,000 internships were canceled, according to the Ministry of Higher Education. That’s what Ayse went through. She had to re-register, as a repeater, in September 2020, when she had already validated all her exams in spring 2020 – because obtaining her diploma is conditioned by the validation of an internship.

In this first episode of the miniseries Work in progress) Dedicated to the first jobs and designed with the media Tapage, Louise Hemmerlé wonders how the internship has become so much of a grail, whether for integration into the job market, but also for the validation of her higher studies?

She interviewed Dominique Glaymann, professor and researcher in sociology at the University of Evry. He works on the relationship between training and employment, and on the employability of young graduates. He has studied the internships a lot, and he observed their inflation which he describes as “uncontrolled”. He explains which political and economic trends have justified the establishment of internships to respond to mass unemployment among young people. It also details the excesses of internships, between those which serve as a substitute for salaried employment, “2 months less 1 day” internships, or even extra-curricular internships, which are illegal. According to him, the internship thought of as a shoehorn towards the first job does not at all solve the problem of the professional integration of young people in the long term.

Work in progress) is a Louie Media podcast. Presenter: Camille Maestracci. Journalist: Louise Hemmerlé. Louise Hemmerlé is in charge of production. This episode was edited and directed by Cyril Marchan. The music is by Jean Thévenin and the mix was made by Olivier Bodin. Marion Girard is production manager, and Maureen Wilson is editorial manager. Mélissa Bounoua is in production management and Charlotte Pudlowski in editorial management.

To make Louie’s podcasts accessible to all, written transcripts of the episodes are available on our website. If the one for the episode you are looking for is not yet available, you can write to us at [email protected]

See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.