Concerns with regard to internships relate to the most common challenges:

• Lack of engagement and competences of mentors or other types of guidance staff;

• Lack of transparency on hiring practices;

• Lack of clarification of learning objectives;

• Internships are often not based on clear rules regarding crediting;

• Length of traineeships is often longer than 6 months.

There exists a risk of ‘abuse’. Some employers make use of the disproportion of young people and jobs that are provided to them with the opportunity to obtain work experience with low or no salary, which is leading to cheap labor, replacing regular employees by interns in conducting tasks and maybe substituting employees with interns. To exclude holes in the CV, young people often must join multiple internship programs, since internships only rarely lead to an employment contract.

Regarding bad practices related to internships, there are some concerns raised at national level. For example, in the Netherlands, hotline to denounce bad practices in internships was opened up by a labor union for young people. Many stories have been collected from graduates, which mostly mention the low compensation for full-time work. Policy makers can also facilitate such a hotline for interns in their country.

In optimisation process of the internship program and to avoid the bad practices, current interns are great resources to use. It is very useful to ask them the following questions:

• How would you improve your first week of internship in general?

• What was good about your supervisor’s attitude towards you and what would you advise him to improve?

• What kind of skills did you gained at the internship and what skills would you consider to be more useful to learn?

• What was the most challenging about your work and which tasks were the hardest?