In addition to RateMyPlacement, thousands of internships are to be made available to help school leavers and graduates find work during the recession. The Graduate Talent Pool website will show about 2,000 internships at first with more promised within months. There will also be work placements for non-graduates - including 10,000 places for 18 to 21-year-olds who have not been to university. Under the banner of Building Young Britain there is £40m of government funding for a network of mentors and job clubs. Use it!!

So, if you didn’t know that you need work experience to land a job this summer, good luck sweeping the streets. The question is, at what cost do you get that experience? To be fair, arch-homosexual and journalist Johann Hari has been bleating for a while about how unfair work experience is as, often being unpaid, it favours those whose mummy and daddy can supplement the pocket money. 66% of young people feel obliged to work for free because of the recession – leaving them feeling exploited and underpaid. Be realistic: two weeks is about the limit for unpaid work, 4 weeks in the media. If the employer is trying to get more out of you than that, they are taking the piss: decline after two weeks and walk away – its still all on your CV. Make them understand that your own debts are huge, any business worth its salt will help you out. All you want is train and beer money after all (about £80 a day). AS listed on Onrec, the NCWE’s tips to help students and graduates avoid exploitation: • Discuss the purpose of the internship and clarify expectations from the start • Ensure the placement is valuable – does it give insight into a particular industry? Will it improve certain skills or clarify career aspirations? • Discuss the possibilities of any future paid work with employer, pointing out the skills that you have gained during the internship. • Re-consider the value of the internship if it ceases to supply useful contacts and training opportunities • Everyone has a choice and if the balance between valuable work experience tips into exploitation then it is up to you to decide whether to continue or not

The summer may traditionally be the time of year when you find out which pub has the best beer garden or you experiment with how long you can stay in bed for, but I’m sorry to say all my student bed headed friends that you might have to abandon these traditional pursuits and turn your mind to making yourself more employable.  Research released by TMP Worldwide shows that 60% of graduating students in 2010 will not have any suitable work experience and that 78% will have spent the previous summer relaxing.  The summer is a time to relax, but it should also be a time to make yourself more employable for the future, especially in a time of such economic uncertainties as many of the reports we see passing through Here Comes The Boss Towers indicate that graduates are going to have an increasingly hard time in the recruitment market.  Thankfully this information is dribbling down and the National Council for Work Experience (NCWE) got out on to the streets to find out what you think, and the results were illuminating.  The NCWE survived 1500 students and graduated and found that 66% of them felt obliged to do some sort of unpaid internship due to the recession and to make themselves more employable and 67% felt they were being exploited by employers offering unpaid internships, but only 49% had actually done any of this unpaid work!  I spoke to my good friend Heather Collier, director of the NCWE to find out what she thought: “It’s worrying to hear that so many young people consider themselves as exploited and almost forced to work for free. Nobody should feel that to gain the employability skills they need to land a job, they have to work without pay for a significant length of time. These are difficult to times for everyone, but it’s not a green light for businesses to act unethically. If there is any doubt in an employer’s mind regarding potential exploitation, it’s simple – pay them!�

We said it yesterday and probably the day before that and the week before that and the month before that, but get yourself some work experience.  Get yourself an internship!  Even the government are catching onto our ideas and it’s a well known fact that they’re a bunch of f*** wits! Never missing the chance to provide a sound bite or two my good friend David Lammy The Minister for Skills (He has some mad beat boxing skills!) attended a conference organised by the East of England Development Agency and said that graduates could provide fresh talent for businesses: “The Talent Pool will sit alongside the thousands of other opportunities available to new graduates that will help them improve their chances to get a long-term and well paid career�.  If the government know it’s a good idea, then businesses will also know it’s a good idea so check out some of these videos on internships or our friends at RateMyPlacement or WEXO.

If we’ve said it once we’ve said it a hundred times, GRADUATES SHOULD GET WORK EXPERIENCE.  You’ve probably heard this more than once yourself, but it’s true and now the University of Glamorgan’s head of careers is saying exactly the same.  That’s right the copying Euros Evans has told his students that they’re facing a unique set of challenges to find a graduate job in this downturn and it’s reinforced the need for students to get some work experience before starting their job hunt: “When the economy does recover graduates need to put themselves in a position to be ready to take on the new opportunities which will present themselves and to get their career aspirations back on trackâ€�.  See, it’s always worth considering a placement.  Watch this video for some more details