Over the last year we’ve received more emails than ever enquiring about internships and work experience. With soaring youth unemployment, rising university fees and of course the dreaded ongoing recession (double, triple dip or even quadruple dip now - it's hard to keep up), the desire to work and find work is very much alive.
As an agency we always encourage training and career progression. We've had work experience students spend anywhere between a day and two months with us – all of whom have worked on exciting projects with talented people. We’ve even had a class of 30 ten year olds in the office learning how we work who had some interesting ideas to contribute!
So it gave us great pleasure last month to be able to launch our first official intern programme- RAW at Rufus. RAW at Rufus is a 12 week paid internship for creative folk, technologists, account managers and planner people. It’s about people with talent wanting to learn from some of the best people in the industry. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know where they want to be in five years time, and they don’t necessarily have to have gone to uni, just so long as they have a passion for the creative industry and are hungry to learn.
They will get to create, learn and collaborate with each other as well as the wider Rufus team. They will produce real work which will help them to understand more about our industry and gain insight into how creative work is produced for clients. Each intern will have a dedicated mentor to help develop their existing skills while learning new skills and getting to grips with how the agency works on a day to day basis.
Most importantly they’ll get to experience the social side of our agency, from pub quizzes to fancy dress, along with all the tea they can handle. And that’s drinking, not making.
There are lots of young people out there who are eager to learn while earning money doing something they are passionate about. With more and more companies introducing internships and apprenticeships, it is important that they are relevant to the individual and the company. Too many interns complain of being expected to make the tea, being sat away from everyone due to lack of desk space or finishing the internship with no feedback or tips on the work they’ve done or how to continue within the profession. These types of internships need to step aside and make way for something truly engaging, relevant and exciting.
Keep up to date on RAW at Rufus via our Facebook page and Twitter.