TRAINEESHIPS – OPPORTUNITY OR ENTRAPMENT FOR WOMEN?

Youth proved to be one of the most vulnerable groups in the face of economic recession, with constant high or even increasing rates of unemployment or NEET all over EU countries. Traineeships, also known as internships or stages, are becoming more and more important due to their role in facilitating transition of youth from school to employment, first contact with the world of work and acquisition of practical skills. Nowadays we are even talking of “traineeship generation”, the one of newly graduated youth, highly educated who fail to find permanent and quality jobs after graduation; instead they find themselves “entrapped” in consecutive traineeships as a strategy to build a career (Schmidlin, Witmer, 2007). Current paper aims to analyses the gender dimension of traineeships experiences in the EU, with focus on the learning environment provided as well as on their effectiveness in facilitating access to permanent jobs. The paper uses the data set of Flash Eurobarometer 378 “The experience of traineeships in the EU”, carried out in 2013.