The age old chicken-and-egg problem of first-time job seekers is that every employer wants to hire someone with experience… but how can you ever get your first work experience if every job opening requires experience? This is where it may be tempting to work for free in some capacity to get that initial experience. But should you work for free? Working for free can be exploitative, it can devalue what you’re really worth, and it sets a bad precedent that employers can expect free work.
In my experience, and from watching the experience of many others… working for free, under some very limited and specific circumstances, can actually have a tremendous benefit to your career by allowing you to learn, to grow, to build confidence, and to demonstrate your experience. Under other circumstances though, like unpaid internships at companies that can well afford to pay you and aren’t teaching you anything valuable, in my opinion you’re very likely being exploited, and it’s just not worth it.
So when to work for free and when to take a pass? Here’s when I suggest working for free may be worth it…
Projects for charities, nonprofit and volunteer organizations
Charities, nonprofits and volunteer organizations that exist due to donations, government grants and volunteer time, may legitimately not have the budget to pay for things that they would like to have done, whether it’s a website, graphic design or social media. People will do things like volunteer at the library every week to teach people how to read, or serve soup to the homeless from a kitchen, in order to help these organizations fulfill their mission. Making a WordPress website or a logo, or performing some other service, can be the digital equivalent of serving soup to the homeless or a lawyer doing “pro bono” work for clients that can’t afford their services.
Mind your hours of course… you can only do so much pro bono work, but whether you’re looking for first time experience or just want to help out, volunteering your services to a charity, nonprofit or volunteer organization can help your community while giving you real-world experience.
Open source contributions
Open source projects involve source code, design documents or content that is freely available to the public, and that generally speaking the public are free to contribute to as well. In software development this means software developers coming together to build everything from operating systems to video games. A common misconception is that open source is something specific to software development, and that only software developers can contribute to open source projects. Even for software projects, contributions ranging from event planning to writing documentation are also required, but there are a range of other industries that use open source.
Contributing to open source projects allows you to help build things that benefit everyone. Not everyone can afford expensive proprietary software that costs thousands of dollars per year, but free solutions can do the job good enough (or better). Making open source contributions allows you to work on real-world projects and get feedback on your contributions from the project leaders. Check out this guide on How to Contribute to Open Source to help get you started!
Hobby projects for yourself
Projects that you work on for yourself can have enough intrinsic value to make them worthwhile. One of my friends setup a Raspberry Pi and sensors to monitor his home wine-making operation, so that he could track and analyze things like temperature over time. It might not be worth it if you measure the worth of your hours in dollars, but if it’s a labour of love than it’s a different story. Hobby projects that you work on out of sheer passion can make for the best experience, because your passion for the work will motivate you and will show up when you talk about the project with others (like potential employers).
A business you own shares in
This one you need to be a little careful with… there’s a never ending list of people that will offer you “sweat equity” in their startup business. It’s difficult for a business to get customers or investment for vapourware, and so often startup businesses will rely on giving equity (i.e. shares in the company) to developers and other early team members in order to build a prototype or minimum viable product.
You’ll need to make a judgement call with this one based on the viability of the business, your interest in the business, and the equity that you would take away. I would also strongly advise getting a lawyer to look over any paperwork you sign regarding equity in the company.
Even if it’s something you’re building for your own business idea, you still need to be mindful of the time you’re investing into something that may not have a payoff. All that said, working on and building something for a new business can be a great way to gain experience… businesses have customers with requirements, and who can provide feedback, which can help you to learn and grow.
What about situations to avoid? Or at the very least, exercise extreme caution?
Unpaid internships
Unpaid internships devalue your work, help set a precedent that companies can expect free labour from new graduates, and unlike side projects done on evenings and weekends, occupy too much of the intern’s time. In some cases, and I’ll admit that not all will agree with me here… unpaid internships might be worth it… for example when the intern is receiving a high-level of very valuable training, or when the intern receives academic credit, or when a job offer is guaranteed after a period of unpaid training. Sadly unpaid internships are common in many industries, and often they aren’t providing the sort of high-value training that is really supposed to justify the unpaid nature of the internship. Be very, very careful with unpaid internships.
Spec work
Spec work is when companies ask you to perform some task for free to see your work, and then they may or may not hire or pay you later. Often times this will come in the form of a contest… a $100 prize to design a website layout for example, that leaves you competing with potentially hundreds of other people for the prize. Some recruitment platforms are even building this type of spec work into their system… they’ll have hundreds of students complete work to demonstrate their skills to an employer, who is then able to pick the top student(s) for the job. Unless you’re OK with doing it “just for fun”, I would advise staying clear of spec work… if you’re doing work that isn’t a hobby passion project (where you are your own customer), one of the key things you want out of the process is customer or user feedback, and/or mentorship, which spec work doesn’t provide.