internship as a way to tackle unemployment?

Korea’s conglomerates have yielded to a growing demand from the government to salvage a wave of fresh university graduates with bleak job prospects, when they announced to cut overall wages of executives and entry-level employers thereby creating budget rooms enough to hire a few hundreds of them as an intern.

This certainly serves as good news at a time when all-time-high unemployment numbers are one of the most serious problems facing the country.

I did an intern myself for two months during my graduate school years in newspaper, and it was not as an exciting work as I had previously imagined. I only was levied on unwanted boring works from 9 to 6, without writing opportunities in sight. When my portion of works was done, I was just sitting on my desk, killing time, doing some errand for other reporters.

As time has changed since then when internship was not so much an actual work as an ‘experience’ of corporate atmosphere, it is now regarded as one of the most feasible solutions for youth unemployment. It must be different both for companies and interns as to how to consider the nature of ‘internship.’

It remains to be seen whether companies could find jobs more than just menial and simple assistance to the highly-educated who would otherwise be hired as a regular employee. And interns should be more aggressive and responsible in taking care of the jobs given to them.