To Pay Or Not To Pay
is not really the question.
I’ve seen this internship debate a lot lately, which is awesome because open dialogue is how positive progress happens! I want to give you my take on it and explain a little about the internship program the military offers to service members, like me, that are transitioning to civilian life and how it can be a truly symbiotic relationship.
TLDR/BLUF; paid internships are great and should be the norm. However, to pay or not to pay isn’t really the question. As with everything there are edge cases such as the military’s internship program designed to help transitioning veterans get relevant experience and land great jobs post service. Skip to the end to learn more!
My kids love to play with cardboard boxes. They will raid the recycling every day for more building materials and create the most amazing things that leave me awestruck at their imagination and creativity. Everything from the standard rocket ship to a dino rock star or even entire play pretend worlds for all their stuffies. It almost makes buying them toys feel pointless. I love watching them and being inspired to let my inner child out and get lost in my own imagination. Although I consider myself a creative type, I’m generally more practical by nature when it comes to what I am creating and why, so I need this reminder from time to time even if it means my house is a cardboard disaster area and I end up scrubbing marker off my walls for the next week.
What does this have to do with tech and internships? Nothing directly; it has everything to do with imagination and creativity! As creatives and innovators in the tech and adjacent industries, we are constantly creating and learning new technologies and designing new products or updating and transforming existing ones. We are often charged with the challenge of taking the cardboard box, cutting it up and reimagining it as something new or better. Something like a herbivore t-rex with longer and more functional arms so she can shred on her guitar singing about her journey as a small-town tyrannosaurus living in a late cretaceous world. Maybe a rocket ship that lands on Mars, immediately and autonomously setting up a whole civilization with all the necessities to sustain a large city of anthropomorphized stuffed animals until the terraforming process has been completed.
Imagination and creativity shouldn’t only be applied to technologies and applications or products. We should be applying that big right brain energy to the way we conduct business, including and maybe especially internships considering more and more job listings look something like this…
Interning is about learning the ropes, building experience, and adding value to the team. Internships are incredible tools for fresh talent to gain much needed experience. Enclosing the opportunity in a box saying it must or mustn’t be paid or it should be this or that is just limiting the potential for both the company and the intern to gain as much value as possible out of a situation that should be mutually beneficial. Who’s to say being paid money is what will give an intern the best opportunity or the most value and who’s to say that being paid must be in the form of money? There are endless opportunities for creativity with how an internship is set up and compensated and it should be a case-by-case basis derived from what is best for the intern and the company, so everyone wins. You would probably be hard pressed to find anyone that would scoff at being paid for their work, however requiring the internship to be paid can be limiting and in some cases disqualifying. Even if they are edge cases, a little bit of open minded and creative thought can literally change a life.
Case in point, I recently interviewed with a great company that I would have been beyond stoked to work with, and I did well. They wanted to invite me to the next round (which I would have crushed #notcockyjustconfident) but since I still have six months left on my contract, meaning until May 2022 I can’t start full time anywhere except as an intern, they had to pass me up. I totally understand and I am not dogging on this company at all, they were great, and I look forward to reapplying when the timing lines up. However, a little flexibility on HR’s side and I could have interned for those six months, which would benefit both the company and me. I would have spent six months learning the ropes, getting familiar with the code base, adding value to the team and company and it wouldn’t have cost the company a dime. Then at the end I would already have a job that I am settled into or at least the opportunity to interview for a position and the company would have a solid employee or the option to interview me and send me on my way if it wasn’t a good fit. Understandably, HR didn’t want the hassle of setting up an unpaid internship as it would require exceptions to company policy, it’s easier and cleaner to just hire one of the other candidates that were ready to start on their timeline. Imagine if the company didn’t have such a strict policy and instead gave recruiters and HR managers the lateral freedom to have open dialogue with someone they deem to be a solid candidate about setting up a mutually beneficial arrangement.
IF YOU’RE IN THE TLDR BOAT YOU CAN LEARN ABOUT THE MILITARY’S INTERNSHIP PROGRAM BELOW.
SkillBridge is a program the military has for service members that are transitioning to the civilian work force that allows us to spend the last six months of our contract working for a potential employer as an intern. The program already has a ton of partnerships with companies globally and in almost every industry, offering service members great internship opportunities that all look a little different. They share some basic common requirements, though. Most notably are 1. The internship must be unpaid (Uncle Sam is still paying us) and 2. At the end of the internship period the company must result in a guaranteed interview or position with the company. There are other requirements mostly related to the specific service member and their time in the military and there is a three- or four-page document to fill out for any opportunities that are not already in the program but all in all it’s a great deal for both the company and the intern. All things considered having a rigid mindset of “internships must be paid” reduces opportunities for our veterans and for companies to gain solid employees. Instead…
