David Macfarlane
The catch-22 is depressingly familiar: you’re an arts postgraduate with no work experience, but organisations won’t hire you because you have no work experience. So how do you acquire work experience?
Employers are increasingly reluctant to hire people solely on the basis of the traditional job interview. For the humanities graduate eager to get into the workplace, the lesson is hard but unavoidable: arts degrees have never been a guaranteed route to employment and they are even less so now.
But a highly imaginative and innovative internship programme being developed in Wits University’s Graduate School for the Humanities and Social Sciences is already cutting through the familiar catch-22. Dovetailing employers’ and job-seekers’ needs, the programme places graduates for three months’ full-time in a workplace, where they focus on a project worked out collaboratively among the graduate school, the host organisation and the graduate.
No photocopying or tea-making is involved, promises graduate school director Professor Carolyn Hamilton. The school determines ”valid tasks”, related to both the student’s postgraduate training and the organisation’s needs.
Programme coordinator Khadija Richards summarises the benefits for graduates: they acquire core professional skills, receive exposure to the dynamics of the workplace, accrue work experience, and apply academic training to practical workplace requirements.
This ”increases their chances of securing employment”, she says. ”A key objective … is to provide students with actual work experience while at the same time creating a supportive environment and safety net that [allows] students to identify and hone their particular skills without contractual employment-related pressures.”
Those pressures include employees’ vulnerability, says Hamilton. ”Monica Lewinsky, who was after all an intern, is an extreme, almost caricatured, example of what can happen to young people in the workplace. The programme recognises that young people in first-time employment can be vulnerable.” Sexual harassment, ethical issues in the workplace and the political profile of an organisation are among the issues the programme discusses.
The response of host organisations has been enthusiastic, Hamilton says. ”They see it as a good way of trying out a potential employee, and at the same time to assess that person’s training needs.” Neither can adequately be done in a job interview.
Graduates in this year’s internship programme come from a variety of academic fields: psychology, industrial sociology, international relations, media studies, business management, political studies and forced migrations studies. Most had no work experience, but received placements in organisations such as a range of NGOs, university human resource departments, Fedsure and the research unit of the Gauteng legislature.
The programme runs for five months and has three main components. A three-week training programme focuses on professional skills development, including presentation skills and professional writing skills; workplace governance, including the Labour Relations Act and the Employment Equity Act; and career planning, job-search techniques, interview etiquette and CV construction.
The three-month placement in a workplace follows, during which students receive extensive support from both the host organisation and the graduate school. Students focus on one project over the period of their placement, and also complete weekly tasks that assess their performance and role in the organisation.
Finally, an internship report involves students in applying their academic training to an issue, debate or process in their host organisations.
Hamilton says the programme will focus next year on expanding its range of host organisations in the business sector. To this end, Wits will have the advisory services of Penny Krige, one of the country’s top human resources directors, whose equally strong university experience makes her well placed to build a programme that, centrally, aims to bridge the gaps between academe and the world of work.