Work experience standard needed to benefit businesses

Businesses have been told that a more structured work experience programme would benefit both them and their interns.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has recently suggested that Employers should be forced to pay interns a minimum of £2.50 an hour to prevent exploitation.

Dr. Tessa Stone, chief executive of national education charity BrightsideUNIAID, explained how the lack of a work experience standard is another problem for businesses.

“It means that as an employer looking at CVs, when someone says they have done two or four weeks volunteering for a charity, you don’t really know what it means or what experience they might have got from that,” she said.

“Something that allows both the graduates and the people employing them to calibrate and take a better view on the usefulness of that sort of thing would definitely be good.”

She also pointed out that a standard would ensure that interns do not waste their time on work experience programmes.

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