An intern is not an employee

An architecture practice of twelve people takes on four interns at the same time, on a post left vacant by a departure. The fourth is one too many, and the post could not be given to an intern at all. The fine faced is 2 000 € per intern concerned. Before you read on: how many interns could that practice host?

The agreement, and what it carries

The intern must sign an internship agreement: it is the document that founds the placement, and it binds three parties, the educational institution, the host organisation and the intern themselves.

Its content is prescribed. It sets out the course of study followed, the skills to be acquired, the activities assigned, the names of the referring teacher and of the workplace mentor, the dates and the weekly hours of attendance.

It also carries the practical side: the amount of the allowance, the supervision arrangements, the benefits offered, the social protection scheme, the conditions for suspension and termination, and the reference to the internal rules.

Hosting comes with a duty to supervise. The intern is received and accompanied by a mentor throughout the internship, and that mentor is answerable for meeting the educational objectives set in the agreement.

• An internship cannot replace an absent employee, one whose contract is suspended, or one who has been dismissed.
• It cannot be used to carry out a regular task matching a permanent post.
• It cannot answer a temporary increase in workload.
• It cannot fill a seasonal job.

Six months, and three interns at a time

Training carried out in a workplace runs for six months at most per host organisation and per teaching year. The ceiling is therefore not a calendar-year one: it follows the intern's school year.

Those six months have an equivalent in hours, which is the real counting rule. The maximum duration is reached as soon as the intern has completed, during the teaching year, 924 hours of actual attendance in the host organisation.

The number of simultaneous interns depends on headcount. Businesses with fewer than twenty employees may host three at most at the same time; above twenty employees, the ceiling becomes 15 % of the headcount per calendar week.

A further limit applies to supervision: each mentor follows three interns at most over the same period. A practice can therefore hit the mentor limit before it hits the headcount one.

The hour counter explains a common situation. A part-time internship spread over seven months stays lawful as long as actual attendance does not reach the hourly ceiling; a full-time six-month internship, by contrast, brushes against it in its very last week.

The waiting period between two internships

One post cannot take two interns back to back. The employer must observe a waiting period between two internships on the same post: it is one third of the duration of the previous internship.

A six-month internship therefore imposes two months of waiting before another intern takes up the same post. The rule closes the door on a permanent post disguised as a run of internships.

A record must also be kept. The employer keeps an up-to-date list of the internship agreements concluded and enters the surnames and forenames of the interns hosted in a specific part of the single staff register.

The waiting period applies to one post only, not to one intern nor to the whole business. Two interns may therefore start on the same day on two distinct posts, within the simultaneous number allowed by the headcount.