NET RESULTS:Jobseekers are being given the opportunity of gaining valuable work experience through the internship programme, writes KARLIN LILLINGTON

JOBBRIDGE, THE national internship programme which launched amid high publicity and fanfare a while back, has seemed to have gone quiet.

I wondered what was going on with a programme that had been optimistically promising up to 5,000 internships for out of work jobseekers.

One of the questions posed by sceptics was how beefy these internships would actually be. Would they be low-level positions for low-budget interns? Would the scheme turn out to be a cheap labour scheme for businesses, rather than the much-touted potential training and experience ground for jobseekers that might result in a permanent job?

I phoned Martin Murphy, the managing director of HP in Ireland and the Government-appointed chairman for JobBridge to see where things stood. To my surprise, they seem to be standing on pretty firm ground, for a programme that only launched on June 29th.

Already 1,285 internships have been listed on the website and Murphy says some 500 more are being vetted for listing. “The response has been very strong from employer groups,” he says.

A total of 473 interns have been selected by companies and 292 have already started their programmes. Murphy says a lot of firms will be looking to start people in the autumn rather than mid-summer for these six to nine-month positions.

“For a lot of the bigger companies it also takes time within [the human resource department] to bring someone in. There is probably about four to five weeks of paperwork. So with most companies there will be a bit of a time lag [to get jobs listed],” he says.

That’s the case with his own company. HP Ireland would hope to bring in about a dozen people over the year, with initial clearance only now complete for the first three positions.

He is adamant JobBridge isn’t just about large firms either. “We talked with a lot of medium and large companies offline in advance of the launch of the programme . . . so it wouldn’t be big companies only. We wanted to have a broad spectrum involved.”

A perusal of existing listings indicates there is a wide range of posts available in companies of all sizes: seven in agri-food and fisheries; 28 in media and design; 66 in building and construction; 44 in health, education or social employment; 159 in software and IT; and many others, including more than 300 in management, administration and clerical and another 300-plus in sales and advertising.

JobBridge will take a roadshow around the State in the autumn, to better inform potential employers and interns about what’s involved and on offer.

Still, the programme faces another hurdle. While internships are a long-established concept in north America, Murphy is well aware that the idea itself needs to be sold over here. Put simply: will jobseekers buy the intern concept and not feel they are being brought in as short-term labour with a swift goodbye at the end?

Interns are being paid only €50 a week – a fraction of a proper salary in most of the listed positions. However, that money is paid in addition to an intern’s social welfare benefits. Moreover, the idea is that many of these posts will roll over into full-time employment, or a letter of recommendation on top of solid work experience.

Murphy notes there is a vetting system in place for the internships, which was strengthened after a handful of the initial listings received seemed vague. Employers are also given programme guidelines: “We’ve put lots of checks and balances in there.”

But this will be an area of concern that will only be addressed by the success or not of the programme. And even then it’s a good bet there will be criticism. This has been the case in the United States with the H1B Visa programme, heavily used by the technology sector to bring in employees from abroad for time-limited placements.

US tech sector employees and unions have argued that the visas create cheap labour for the industry and result in few jobs.

The truth with these visas as well as internship programmes lies somewhere in between. They can be exploited, but ideally the exploitation is by the intern rather than the company.

Personally, I know that I, and many acquaintances, have gained much from US internship programmes. Unlike JobBridge, many of these paid absolutely nothing – but were an excellent way of gaining experience, learning beyond what we had studied in college and getting a valuable reference if not a job.

Those who had the worst experiences were typically the annoying people who complained all the time and lazily expected a job at the end, rather than feeling they were being offered a chance to learn and sell themselves into a possible job by working hard.

Moreover, speaking again from experience, most of the Irish people I’ve known who went to the US on H1B visas for tech jobs ended up with their companies obtaining a green card for them and a permanent position.

From the employer side, Murphy says companies end up investing nine months of development and specialist training in an intern – it makes sense for them to want to retain that investment.

“JobBridge is a development programme, not a work experience programme,” Murphy says. “This is an opportunity for someone to go and make themselves indispensable to an organisation and get a job offer in the end. That’s the spirit of it.”