[LRUG] Running tech internships in startups, and doing it fairly

Chris Adams mail at chrisadams.me.uk
Fri Jun 1 01:58:15 PDT 2012


Hi Murray,   

I think the most uncertainty, she I mentioned "fairly" was is basically paying for their time, and making sure they're not just treated like a cheap employee.

If a someone's going to give a few weeks of their time offering to help out somewhere with the understanding that they're trading what they could paid elsewhere against being able to learn new skills, then it seems fair to at least make sure they can afford to eat, and travel, and ideally be able to afford not to have two work one or two other jobs to afford to do so.

So my assumption at the mo is that the minimum an intern would expect would be well… the national minimum wage if they're spending a fair chunk of their time at a company, and that they're not being placed in positions where they're solely responsible for work there (that's why I was mentioning pairing or other activities where there's scope for a degree of supervision).  

However, beyond those basic guidelines, and having not run one before, I'm not sure how others have structured to be useful for an intern, without being too disruptive to the company, and it would be great to hear it.

Finding specific guidance hasn't proven to be too easy though so far. Here's about all the guidance I can find from .gov:

Here's the nice url for govuk:
https://www.gov.uk/your-right-to-minimum-wage/work-experience-and-internships-paid-or-unpaid

Here's the less pretty url from business link
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1096704110&r.l1=1073858787&r.l2=1081657912&r.l3=1096697303&r.s=sc&type=RESOURCES

--  
Chris Adams
mobile: 07974 368 229
twitter: @mrchrisadams
www: chrisadams.me.uk


On Friday, 1 June 2012 at 09:33, Murray Steele wrote:

> On 1 June 2012 09:24, Chris Adams <mail at chrisadams.me.uk (mailto:mail at chrisadams.me.uk)> wrote:
> > Hi guys,
> >  
> > Apologies if this is off-topic. I'm totally happy to take this convo elsewhere if it's beyond the remit of LRUG here.
> >  
> > I was at Silicon Milkroundabout last week, and I met a number of really bright young people who are either halfway through their degrees, or looking for internships to gain a degree of experience and exposure to working in a tech startup, rather than immediate employment (either they don't feel   inexperienced enough to apply for full-time positions, or they want to test the waters first).  
> >  
> > We've been looking at running an internship programme over here at AMEE, and while there's no shortage of practices to structure an internship around for interested young engineers (for example pairing exercises, seeing how releases are planned and features, and tracking deployment afterwards), but the main thing stopping us has been struggling to find specific guidance on how to do it *fairly*.  
>   
> We've run an intern program at Unboxed for the past 2 years and are doing it again this year, so I might be able to shed some light on what we've done (good and bad).  Before I do though, what exactly do you mean by "fairly"?
>   
> > Anyone here in small companies have run something similar successfully, with a specific tech/engineering focus here?
> >  
> > Thanks,
> >  
> > Chris
> >  
> >  
> >  
> >  
> > --  
> > Chris Adams
> > mobile: 07974 368 229
> > twitter: @mrchrisadams
> > www: chrisadams.me.uk (http://chrisadams.me.uk)
> >  
> >  
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