Paid internships and trafficked job anxiety
According to a report by the China Youth Daily on October 10, Zheng, a student from Beijing, wanted to apply for further study at a foreign university. A teacher from a study abroad planning agency said that he needed to have internship experience in a large domestic factory and recommended 30,000 yuan in exchange for an internship resume in a large factory. After paying the money, Zheng has now started his internship, and his work content is to turn the documents into PPT. Now is the "Golden Nine and Silver Ten" recruitment season, and some college students have begun to try "paid internships": students pay a fee, and institutions or companies provide internship positions, internship certificates, project experience, and even "internal referral" opportunities.
What was originally an internship to improve abilities and accumulate experience has gradually become a ‘commodity’ with a clearly marked price. Intermediaries rely on packaging jobs, selling referrals, and forging experience to harvest graduates, forming an industrial chain that wanders in the gray area.
At present, some companies generally require job seekers to have relevant internship experience when recruiting. However, school students with no workplace experience often have no channels to obtain internship opportunities in large companies. This puts them into an endless cycle of ‘no experience, no job, no job, no experience’. As a result, ‘paid internship’ has become a helpless compromise for some young people in the dilemma of finding a job.
This dilemma has caused job-hunting anxiety to continue to spread, and the glossy internship recruitment posts of large companies on social platforms have further amplified the anxiety of students with "blank resumes" and also given some intermediary agencies an opportunity to take advantage of them.
However, in reality, some high-priced internships are mostly about doing odd jobs, organizing data, making PPT, etc. It is difficult to get in touch with the core business and cannot learn professional skills. There are even organizations that make up fake positions and link up with shell companies just to sell a water-filled internship certificate. These so-called internship experiences cannot stand the test of the workplace. Once students encounter a scam, it is extremely difficult to defend their rights. They often lose money, waste time, and may miss the best period for job hunting.
The chaos of ‘paid internships’ exposes the disconnect between campus employment guidance and market demand. Most employment guidance in colleges and universities focuses on theoretical explanations, and rarely provides students with internship positions that are suitable for majors and have high value. The company's internship recruitment information is scattered and messy, and information asymmetry makes it difficult for many students to distinguish between true and false, and they often passively rely on various intermediaries.
In fact, the core value of internships is to improve abilities and accumulate experience, rather than to pile up a shiny resume. The real competition in the workplace is about personal professional strength and practical ability, and a purchased internship certificate cannot support long-term career development. If conditions permit, young people can start from small and medium-sized enterprises and school-enterprise cooperation projects and accumulate experience step by step.
To rectify the gray industry chain of "paid internships" requires the joint efforts of many parties, so that every internship can return to the essence of experience, so that young people can find less routine and more practical ways to find a job.
Luo Denlian
"Worker Daily" (October 13, 2026, Page 05)
