Transitions good practice in internships: to pay or not to pay.

Overview of Transitions’ good practice model of Internships and recruitment.

Thank you for your interest in Transitions. Our employer and internship clients understand the bottom line value of good diversity management and we’re delighted that you want to know more. 

The Transitions internships and recruitment programme is a partnership between Transitions, its candidates and good employers who wish to widen their pool of strong job applicants. Via Transitions, they can access the extensive skills of refugee professionals and enable the competitive jobs market to work more efficiently and fairly regarding refugee applications. Without that, refugees cannot compete. 

Including Transitions social enterprise in the competitive recruitment process to fill any post is, of course, optional. If a Transitions intern or other Transitions candidate is successfully selected for a post, recruitment fees start at a highly competitive one-off 5% and are never more than 15%.  This funds Transitions’ intensive employment support services to our candidates. Our Internships service has no fee. We do not charge our candidates anything at any point. We take the financial risk because we believe in our candidates and in the potential for the jobs market to respond better. 

Refugees in the UK are 6 times less likely to be in employment than the UK average, even though c 25% of them are highly skilled, multilingual, experienced & all have full permission to work, with no visa requirement. 

Barriers in the skilled jobs market for Professionals with refugee background. 

• ¬ Misinformation in the market about refugees’ right to work
• ¬ Negative media images and assumptions have become mainstreamed
• ¬ Miscommunications on qualifications requirements and equivalence of overseas qualifications and experience  
• ¬ Both early career and established career applications from refugees often rejected at initial application. Often ill-informed assumptions made by employers on suitability.  Refugees’ applications often not well presented due to lack of access to UK careers advice.   
• ¬ Need for UK professional work references and recent relevant experience: many experienced professionals with a refugee background have gaps of several years in their CV where they may have been persecuted, imprisoned and/or had to wait for the Home Office to make its decision.
• ¬ Mutual miscommunications both by employers and by refugee professionals on mutual expectations on how the UK jobs market and organisational cultures work.
• ¬ Almost no statutory support for jobseeking refugees. Jobcentre Plus categorises refugees as ‘mainstream’ customers with no specific support provided as statutory. This usually lengthens the unemployment period for highly skilled refugees and creates a Catch 22 situation of ‘no UK reference’ = ‘no job’ = ‘no UK reference’.  Refugee professionals generally require fast, informed careers support, with access to professional work experience in order to find employment. 
• ¬ Effects of Trauma from having been persecuted and forced out of their job and country
• ¬ Poverty after a period of asylum, where they have had no permission to work and no recourse to public funds while they wait for their case to be heard. This means they often do not have good ICT access, cannot buy expensive textbooks or easily pay professional body fees. 
• ¬ Housing is often a major issue for a long time for refugees.  Individuals and families often remain in temporary housing for months or years. 
• ¬ Family reunion is very difficult to manage. There is no specific funding or support.
• ¬ English language. All Transitions candidates are highly educated, have advanced English skills and most are multilingual, but many other refugees are not. 

Transitions’ programme is underpinned by good practice, as recommended in the Volunteering England guide to internships, 2010:

http://www.volunteering-ni.org/fs/doc/civic-engagement/internships-explained-volunteering-england.pdf

We also support the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) recommendation that internships receive an internship allowance, in the way that apprenticeships do. 

You may wish to match the allowance to the London Living Wage (£8.30 per hour) or the Minimum Wage (£6.08) 

(http://www.cipd.co.uk/NR/rdonlyres/5A28F718CC394B9597BCB0C93123BF8D/0/5258_Internships_report1.pdf  However, in the UK internships may be unpaid and only receive an allowance for travel and meals. 

All our candidates are already professionally qualified (often with both overseas and UK University qualifications) and usually already have extensive overseas experience. They are all professionals who have fled persecution overseas & been afforded protection by the UK as refugees. They all have full permission to either work or volunteer in the UK. What they wish to acquire via an internship is UK professional orientation and targeted experience in order to add this to their international profile and enhance their competitiveness in the UK jobs market in their field of work. Without such initiatives, in spite of their professional background, most refugee professionals cannot compete in the UK market, either for internships or for work and stay out of work. This is a loss to ‘UK plc’ and, of course, to them. It is also avoidable. We provide specialist, quality ‘effective jobsearch’ 1-1 and group support and this internship partnership programme. It works. Our partner employers co-design with us part-time professional experience programmes of 3-6 months in length. The organisation accesses the extensive skills of our intern candidates, in return for a structured & supervised internship, which enhances the interns’ competitiveness in the jobs market. 

The structure of an internship 

       We liaise with organisations to jointly provide our interns with:

• ¬ A structured internship role description (which may be adapted as the internship progresses) Pls see  example below. 

• ¬ Clear supervision

• ¬ Time to reflect and study as well as gain professional orientation and experience

• ¬ Monthly joint reviews with Transitions

• ¬ Ongoing APEL Portfolio building with Transitions (record of accredited and experiential learning) 

• ¬ Targetted Jobsearch support with Transitions 

EXAMPLE Voluntary International Development GIS Mapping Internship Role Description

 Main Intern Tasks 

• • Convert available and useful datasets into an accessible and structured format. The data is arranged around geographic standards like post codes, LSOA (Lower Super Output Area) or perhaps other geographic standards like GPS coordinates
• • Develop and expand on our options for data summarising, manipulation and viewing. Currently we are looking to exploit mapping solutions to provide data to users in the most accessible format
• • Assist with standardising UK geographic data and assist with the implementation of this data
• • Spend agreed time in the office reflecting and self-assessing on this experience, using a professional development portfolio, for use in effective Jobsearch, supported by superviser and by Transitions 
• • Spend agreed time in the office researching the UK jobs market and receiving Jobsearch advice and networking support from colleagues

Example Internship Person Specification

Role Title : Geographical Information Modeller – Intern
Qualifications / Training	• Degree or relevant experience in International Development or related area
Experience / Knowledge / Technical Skills	• Experience of researching and managing data, ideally data relating to issues around International Development & Disaster management  • IT skills and a good understanding of basic databases and their uses.  • Experience of or interest in learning use of geographic tools such as GIS software and KML files. • Experience or interest in open source and online visual / map analysis tools and online content development. -  Valuable but not required
Personal Skills	• Good interpersonal and communication skills. • Receptive to new ideas and a willingness to accept change. • Ability to work as part of a team and as an individual.
Career Development	• Desire to self-assess & receive supervisory feedback on employability in chosen career, with support of Transitions  • Willingness to develop a career development portfolio and Jobsearch during internship, with support of Transitions and superviser