If you can't pay me should you hire me? A response from Intern founder Alec Dudson for London Design Festival 2020
– 17th September 2020

If you can’t pay me, should you hire me?

Watch our passionate debate on unpaid internships as part of the London Design Festival on demand now

For our part in today’s New Agency online conference run by students and staff from London College of Communications’ DPS programme, we were asked to talk about an issue close to our hearts.

Unpaid internships were the motivation to start intern back in 2013 and we have made a point of paying every single contributor in print and online since.

Safe to say that Alec’s response here will come as no surprise. Below is a video that we prepared in order to instigate this morning’s debate. In it, Alec lays out his initial response to the question.

Following the above being broadcast on New Agency’s IGTV, Daniella Chukwuezi interviewed Harris Elliot live on Instagram, for whom she worked unpaid earlier this year. In the second half of the live session, Alec was invited back to respond to their conversation. You can watch a replay of that discussion here.

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We’re in the process of planning a new series of Extracurricular, so we’ll be back with more live videos and catch-ups soon. You can also drop in with us tomorrow when we’ll be talking about invoices from 13:00-14:00 BST with the team behind the ‘Stand Out’ personal branding competition that we’re supporting.

If you’d like to read Alec’s piece for It’s Nice That on why universities should teach students how to price their work, you can do so here. If on the other hand, you just want to cut through the BS and learn how to price your work, you can check out and enrol on our online course ‘The Price is Right’ here. Thanks to Sarah and the New Agency team for inviting us to be a part of their event. Re-watch everything and check out their digital publication on Instagram here.

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