Interns, volunteers, and working for free

Ah, the internship. You’ve learned the ropes, paid your dues, and even if you’re a student intern or experienced employee who’s underemployed, the scenario is pretty similar regardless of your current level. You’re a familiar face in the office and have proven yourself time and time again. So now what?

As you gear up to turn that short-term gig into a full-time opportunity, for starters, Jacquelyn Smith writes on Forbes to “act the part.” This means abiding by the company dress code, hours, and overall behavior: “Never wear flip-flops, show cleavage or wear anything that’s ripped or torn.”

Next, you’ll need to take the bull by its horns. Meet with your manager to outline quantifiable goals and demonstrate a positive attitude no matter how menial the tasks may seem. Tom Busbach, former producer at Yahoo! told Forbes, “Not every task you’re going to do is something you’ll enjoy, but have the attitude that these are building blocks to your career. Once you show you can be trusted with small tasks, managers will give you more responsibility.”

As for the third way; make a name for yourself. Volunteer to work in other departments or on task forces that may not be relate to the job. Although it recently passed, one example is Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. By spreading your wings and networking with other folks, it’ll give you a better grasp of the company and ways to explore its numerous departments. Leverage your time there and ask new contacts out to lunch or coffee to get a better understanding of what they do. Plus, it’ll give them the opportunity to get to know you better. During the dialogue, be sure to express interest in working there so they may keep you in mind when opportunities arise.

Lastly, get feedback. Meet with your manager and keep track of your skills and projects to add them to your resume. Keep track of positive emails and notes; ask for recommendations and references. Specifically sit down with your manager and express your interest in working there. After all, he or she isn’t a mind reader! Even if there’s not an opportunity as soon as your internship has ended, be sure to stay in touch so your name is top of mind when full-time opportunities become available.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

While this time of year resonates with college students and grads for internships, experienced workers may find themselves pursuing an internship as well to get hands-on experience and a foot in the door.

Lauren Berger, also known as the Intern Queen who landed 15 internships in four years, tells TIME there are several ways to make the most out of an internship. For starters, she says to know your rights. Considering a few companies have been sued over unpaid internships, you’ll need to know what’s legal and what’s not.

For instance, buzz words like “sales” or “commission” certainly raise red flags. If you’re an intern, you really shouldn’t work on projects that impact revenue.

Moving on, Berger emphasizes getting a mentor. How do you do this? Sounds pretty simple by asking the internship coordinator for permission to contact an executive internally. It’s essentially a quick meeting to simply ask the exec how he or she got started in the business, any mistakes they made early on, and how they would break in today if they were in the intern’s shoes.

The importance of the mentor is raised again as the internship comes to a close. Instead of asking point blank to have a job, the Intern Queen suggests asking for advice.

In the piece she explains, “I tell students to take the pressure off of thinking the internship will turn into a job. An internship doesn’t guarantee that you’ll work at the company afterwards. What you need to do is leverage your contacts and stay in touch with them.” Plus, an internship is a terrific way to get a referral and recommendation for future employment.

With recent lawsuits over unpaid work by former interns from Harper’s Bazaar, Charlie Rose and the movie Black Swan, unpaid internships have come under fire as being exploitative and, many times, illegal. But with the U.S. Department of Labor’s “test for unpaid interns” leaving too much room for interpretation, it’s hard to know where the line is drawn.

According to the labor department, interns at a for-profit business who qualify as employees “typically must be paid at least the minimum wage and overtime compensation for hours worked over 40 in a workweek.” That means if your intern is slaving over a project until 2 a.m. at the office, you better be writing those checks.

Remember, the bottom line is that an unpaid intern’s experience should be focused on his education more so than his benefit to the company, so make sure he or she is picking up a valuable experience.

For more ways to keep your program legit and rewarding, read 7 Things That Are Ruining Your Company’s Internship Program.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

Conde Nast has issued a set of guidelines that will reform its internship program.
The Atlantic reported the news with air quotes around “reform.”

Why? “Because the changes don’t do much to fix the broken system. In fact, the changes just prove how unfortunate the whole situation is.”

Here are the guidelines:

Interns aren’t allowed to stay at the company for more than one semester per calendar year unless granted special clearance by Human Resources.
• Interns are required to do an orientation with HR where they are told to contact them if they are working unreasonably long hours or are mistreated.
• Interns can only work until 7pm and their security badges will actually be modified so that they won’t work after 7pm–meaning they won’t be able to get back into the building after 7 (making any late-afternoon errands or pickups particularly stressful)
• Interns are given stipends (around $550 for the semester)
• Interns have to receive college credit to be eligible for an internship.
• Interns will have to have official mentors
• Interns are only allowed to work on tasks related to the job at hand and no personal errands

“These things should be implicit, not part of some kind of revolutionary reform,” the Atlantic says.

Well, yes. Too little too late, and all. But these rules really should curtail the worst intern abuses (like a manager making the intern pick up her dry cleaning). And while $550 doesn’t go far, is it really an empty gesture?

Sure, unpaid internships suck and may or may not be illegal, but are they unethical? The NYT’s Ethicist took on the question on Sunday.

The writer says:

I took an unpaid internship that I figured would give me experience and help me land somewhere in six months. Instead I’m picking up coffee and dry cleaning and performing other tasks that the company would otherwise have to pay someone for. I know this is the status quo for internships, but it violates the law, and it feels deeply unethical. Taking legal recourse would hurt my career prospects. Is there anything I can demand of this company in exchange for my slave labor?

Ethicist Ariel Kaminer’s response is basically: No, practically speaking. Any legal recourse (or even a well-timed “take this job and shove it”) would indeed hurt your career but not bother the company one bit, because there are likely thousands of people vying for the same position.

Ethically? Yeah, something ain’t right here. It’s not because an internship like this likely violates the Fair Labor Standards Act. “Plenty of internships that violate employment law might still benefit the intern, of course, by giving her an inside track in a competitive field. Even crummy internships have some value. A firsthand glimpse of the mailroom may not be the stuff of dreams, but it’s more informative than no glimpse whatsoever.” It’s because the system favors people with enough disposable income to work without pay for three months, “and it undermines paid employees, who have the same interest you do in making sure every worker is fairly compensated.”

Elizabeth Wagoner, who’s worked on both recent cases of interns suing their employers, told Kaminer that this intern does not have an ethical obligation to quit (and therefore make some sort of statement about the unfairness of the system). Wagoner suggested filing a lawsuit, but we’ll leave that up to you, reader, to decide whether that’s a wise suggestion.

You could take the internship and then anonymously the Labor Department (harder than it sounds since it involves navigating layers of bureaucracy, but could certainly be satisfying). But “don’t tell them it hasn’t been educational,” Kaminer says. “After all, it has already taught you something about the values of the field you hope to enter.”

Ask A Manager Alison Green tackles the question of how much guidance interns should need.

A reader asked why her interns are coming in late or not at all, and doing other unprofessional things.

“Many, many interns really don’t know this stuff. It’s part of the price you pay for hiring really cheap labor; you get to teach it to them,” Green says.

But as for the intern falling asleep in a meeting (which also happened), that is bad, bad bad. Don’t do that.

And for more fun, read the story of “Satan’s intern come to stay”, also on AAM.

Hey, tomorrow is like a free day anyway, because Leap Day only comes ’round once every four years. So to celebrate (or perhaps just coincidentally), InternMatch is hosting a full day of internship advice and resume advice on Google+.

If you +1 InternMatch’s Google + page, then starting at 9:50 a.m. PST, you’ll have access to seven hours of video presentations from recruiters and hiring managers at Google, Nestle Purina, Sirius XM, and CBS Interactive. (Here’s the agenda.)

The remaining 17 hours will be given over to online interactive advice for students.

The program is totally free, but it is kind of an experiment. Recruiting blog ERE.net says that this event for Internmatch “is sort of its debut onto the national stage.” If demand is overwhelming, you might find yourself waiting in line to “hangout” with a career counselor. So we remain skeptical —but excited.

That’s the question Katy Waldman asked on Slate yesterday.

So many unpaid internships, especially in the media world, are technically illegal. We’ve known this for years, and the media has occasionally taken an interest in writing about how exploited these interns are. But it seems, Waldman writes, that there are more unpaid internships than ever.

So why aren’t interns other than Xuedan Wang, who is suing Hearst for back wages owed her for an “internship” that took 50+ hours a week, speaking out? A few reasons:

• Even if she wins her case, Wang has essentially torpedoed her chances of getting fulltime work at Harper’s Bazaar, which was, she had previously said on her website, her career goal.
• If anyone offers unpaid internships, everyone will, because suddenly it’s a competitive advantage to have so many people working for you for free.
• Internships are vastly different from one another, Waldman says. “Some internships are dismal and exploitative; others enthralling and useful; some a mix.”
• And it’s hard to stay “on message” with internships, Waldman concludes. The interns who are exploited working 40+ hours a week without pay are actually the fortunate, privileged ones, because they can afford to work 40 hours a week without pay. “At best, the anti-internship camp is hopelessly confused about whether interns are privileged or disadvantaged,” she says. It’s hard to crusade against internships without having a consistent message.

The New York Times is collecting stories of unpaid internships (“And yes, come to think of it, we are asking you for more free work”) but feel free to share yours with us, too. We’ll start. Lucky enough to have only “had to” do one unpaid internship, and that only 2/5ths time. At the time, it sucked more than anything (the lack of pay, not the work itself) but I now know I got off very easy.

Internships are the most favored way companies locate entry-level talent, according to a new survey by Michigan State University, with 66% of workplaces using them.

A close second at 62 percent was campus career fairs.

Most companies used multiple methods, though—usually eight or more recruiting methods, whether that be the aforementioned internships and career fairs, or referrals, social media or job boards.

The survey was completed by 3,300 workplaces.

According to CBS News and Michigan State’s Collegiate Employment Research Institute, three quarters of the students currently in a four-year degree program will work at least one internship before graduating.

That does raise the interesting question: what do the other 25 percent think they’re doing?

We had reached out to the Huffington Post Union of Bloggers to ask what would happen to the site now that the National Writers Union had ended its boycott against the HuffPost.

The response we got, from someone just signing his/her name as “HPUB,” cleared up a few things: despite being “affiliated” with the National Writers Union local that was leading the boycott, the HPUB isn’t going to be affected.

In short, the HPUB has bigger concerns than the boycott (though it believes, too, that the bloggers should have been paid). The HPUB’s problem is that the Huffington Post isn’t what it used to be.

“HPUB” also called the AOL sale a “coup” and “shameful” and called the HuffPost “ruined forever.” Them’s fighting words!

Here’s the full response, after the jump:

Read more