As a digital trainee at ORMIT, I’m often being confused with an intern. I’m not an intern, however: I’m a trainee. So what is the difference between these two?
Let’s start with the internship position. An intern is a temporary position at a company, often offered to students during summer or winter breaks. The length of an internship ranges usually from a few weeks up to a couple of months. In most cases, an internship’s maximum duration is half a year.
An internship is in most cases unpaid; its purpose is mainly to gain real world experience before finding a permanent position on the job market. As such, an internship is popular among students and some colleges or universities even encourage or require their students to do an internship at a company.
Finally an intern could, at the end of the internship, be hired but this is certainly not always the case.
Then we have the traineeship. A trainee is almost always a paid full-time position, that’s because a trainee is an employee of the company. The main idea behind a traineeship is for a starter to execute a job (on the job learning), but while being trained (external training programmes) at the same time. A traineeship may in some cases have an international aspect (assignments in multiple countries) and a personal coach is also involved to follow up the progress of the trainee.
A traineeship is often a management traineeship, where starters are highly educated but with no or limited previous work experience.
Just like an internship, a traineeship is limited in time. In most companies this varies between one and three years. Once the traineeship ends, the person starts at the company.