Australia: Am I being Exploited at my Internship(web design)?And if offered a full-time job, should I take it?

Question

I have been doing it for a month for 2 days a week, 8am to 5pm and 10am to 5pm. Straight away my supervisor wanted me to design for clients, these banners for facebook company Pages. I got an email with their company and a list of clients. I get promises of getting a job after the internship because this company "is still growing", so I work hard, all the way through lunch to complete things, but she says I'm too slow and need to work faster. I get stuff to do like display advertisements to be designed at home to work on to Friday (I'm doing university full-time so I get pretty busy).
Last week she wanted me to design a full 1 page website for 3 clients of my list (just a mockup not coding using photoshop). She gave me a template related to their business, their "old" website and company photos and colors, and I need to redesign this template by taking screenshots of the page, putting the images together in photoshop then editing them. Some have sliders and topics that are irrelevant so I need to change the text, name ,writing, images, contact details, background etc. of the whole page. I am too slow and take 30min to design a full page even with extra tabs (which I have to recreate too). She says I'm much too slow and even when creating sliders that I shouldn't take so long and she gets angry at me...I feel very pressured to go there, but do it for another month with the hope of gaining a job...but I don't know...

Answer 1

How is that exploitation? You are doing an internship and it seems like you are unable to work at a pace you are required to. It's not an assignment that you have weeks to complete and edit....it's a job and you have to work fast and exact on multiple items and tasks....welcome to life.

Answer 2

They aren't exploiting you, this is what it's like in the real world. The work you're doing is what would be expected of you in the workforce, and there are deadlines. The more designs they churn out the more they get paid. There would also be web developers waiting for those designs back so they can start building and earn their money. Once you become more practiced you will become quicker, until then you'll just have to work longer hours; because 30 minutes really is a bit slow especially when using a template, may be a different story if you were doing a custom design. Keep at it, even if they are fibbing about a full-time job then at least you have experience of whats expected of you, and that you didn't run when the pressure was put on.

Answer 3

Yeah Hugo is right. You're getting experience but I don't think I'd want to work there. If this is an unpaid internship then they're definitely using you.



As far as having to design the pages, try sketching them on paper first and THEN using PS to do the mockups. You'll find it's a bit easier if you have something to work with that you can look at instead of trying to do it all on the screen.

Answer 4

You are getting useful experience, but does not sound like a good place to work.