Should you really take that unpaid internship?

Empower yourself when you’re not in a powerful position in 4 steps.

Image: a woman at an office desk covered by money

There is a secret economy of internships generated by earnest unpaid workers. They sprinkle the corners of Zoom meetings in the hopes of landing a full-time job. Despite the dated perception that interns fetch coffee for “real employees” — this is not the case for many companies in 2022. Interns function as full-time competent workers, debugging codes, developing user experiences, creating entire marketing plans and analyzing user research.

If you are debating whether to apply for one of the estimated “43 percent” of unpaid internships offered by for profit companies, learn how to rewire the way you think about work before you take that next step.

1. Rewire the way you think about work

The idea that people should be paid for their work should not be divisive, but it is in the US. Unsurprisingly, employers who benefit from the secret economy of unpaid labor on sites like LinkedIn argue that interns are unpaid because they are a “money drain” because they “drain” company time and resources since they need to be trained.

Nonetheless, it’s odd that people who don’t want to pay their workers still continue to post job ads…