It is the last day of Ellen Curran’s summer internship at Deloitte when she logs on to a Microsoft Teams meeting to speak to The Irish Times.
The meeting is scheduled for 2pm, so there is only a few hours left of her three-month stint in the technology and transformation department. She joined the team just a few days after taking her final exams at University College Dublin (UCD), where she will graduate next week with a degree in sustainability with a focus on business and economics.
And the week after, she will return to Deloitte’s office off St Stephen’s Green on the firm’s graduate programme.
“I just feel really grateful – that’s the overwhelming feeling,” she says, looking back on her time at Deloitte so far. “I’m so grateful that I got the opportunities that I did in college to be able to get me to where I am now.”
Her gratitude is well placed in this day and age. For many recent graduates, the first step on the corporate ladder seems to be the most difficult one to reach.
A report published by the Bord Bia talent academy this week found that 84 per cent of early-career professionals were in a so-called entry-level paradox, a no man’s land where they felt it was “impossible to get experience without a job and impossible to get a job without experience”.
The findings were stark: seven in 10 felt they were “falling behind professionally” and nearly eight in 10 felt “overwhelmed” and “unsure where to start” on their career journey.
Traditional early career progression has largely been uprooted in recent years as recruitment efforts have reduced, in part due to the broader tightening of the economy, but also as a result of the rapid development in artificial intelligence (AI) resulting in fewer workers needed to undertake certain tasks.
Employment data from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) demonstrates the difficulty many young people experience in securing work and, perhaps, confirms the fears of parents across the country.
Every month so far this year, the youth unemployment rate in the State has been at least double the unemployment rate for those aged over 25 – and in January, July and August it was more than three times higher than the general population.
But raw employment data does not tell the full story behind the tightening of recruitment inside Ireland’s leading companies. Figures from Chartered Accountants Ireland, the professional body, show how the traditional training contract has become a less viable option.
While its total student intake increased by 11 per cent from 2023 to 2024, this was in large part due to a higher uptake of its “flexible route”, which enables people to earn an accountancy qualification without a training contract from an accountancy firm, jumping from 10 per cent of candidates in 2023 to 16 per cent in 2024.
It is a similar story for enrolment numbers at the Law Society of Ireland’s professional practice courses for solicitors. Last year, the professional body pointed to the “rise of in-house”, when 27 per cent of recently qualified solicitors trained in Blackhall Place, the society’s education base, to work in the private sector and State bodies, reflecting “a structural shift away from the traditional dominance of private practice”.
So how can a young person turn a three-month stint as a summer intern into an extended contract and, from there, a long-term career?
“We were actually just discussing this at lunchtime,” Curran says, mentioning the other interns she has worked alongside this summer.
“It’s such a big thing to get the basics right: show up on time, do the work when you’re asked, meet your deadlines – that’s all expected from you – and once you get that right, beyond that it’s just being friendly, welcoming, kind, open; I think that’s something that’s so valued.
“It’s so clear from the second that you enter a company like Deloitte that everyone is so friendly … and willing to help and answer any questions you have. You just have to reciprocate that, I think. I would always make sure to make time for your colleagues and grab a coffee with someone if you want to learn more about what they do.
“And don’t be afraid to ask questions – you’re expected to be curious. But, what I would say is ask a question once, take note of it, remember it, try not to ask the same question over and over again. If you make a mistake, learn from it, grow from it [and] try not to make the same mistake again.”
Jennifer Gallivan is the head of talent acquisition at Deloitte Ireland, having started as a human resources manager at the firm 15 years ago. “What really catches our eye is evidence of teamwork, leadership and resilience,” she says.
“Team sports, volunteering, student representation [and] involvement in university societies aren’t just nice-to-haves, they signal resilience and that you will thrive in our fast-paced, always-evolving environment.
“What we’re looking for is a mindset, not a checklist. We want people who are curious, who take real ownership of their work and who solve problems proactively rather than waiting to be told what to do.”
“The process is simple,” she says, before explaining how the firm ultimately hires more than 100 of its interns across offices in Dublin, Cork, Galway, Limerick and Belfast. “Submit an online application [that] opens in December, then attend one in-person interview with the team you’d work alongside.
“There are no group exercises or multiple rounds. It’s designed to be fair and stress-free, we want you and our team to be the right fit.”
Across the road from Deloitte’s head office is the headquarters of Arthur Cox, one of Ireland’s leading law firms. Inside, hundreds of solicitors are working on commercial cases. Among them is Conall O’Shaughnessy, a partner in the litigation, disputes and investigations department. He joined in 2014 as a trainee solicitor.
He has not forgotten what it was like to work closer to the bottom of the firm, in part, as a result of his work as one of three partners on its “trainee steering committee”.
“It’s something I’ve always been really interested in,” O’Shaughnessy says. “I suppose [it was] a natural fit for me to take on a more formal role as part of the early-stage recruitment process when I became a partner.”
As the summer comes to a close, the committee’s main priority is deciding which interns, who have been at the firm only a few weeks, will return in the years to come as trainees.
O’Shaughnessy says the interns “receive regular feedback from designated people” on their respective teams, “generally on a more informal basis”, and “towards the conclusion of their internship placement, there will be a kind of feedback meeting – which is, again, very informal”.
O’Shaughnessy describes it as “a chance for them to provide feedback on how they found their internship” and, similarly, “then the intern facilitators in each individual department will provide feedback from the team or from those who worked with the intern as to how they got on”.
“It’s fed back up to the trainee steering group and we then conduct a review before deciding as to whether or not to make offers to selective candidates,” he says.
The committee keeps an eye out for a number of qualities – “we’re more focused on green flags than red flags, for want of a better word”, O’Shaughnessy says. – but an all-encompassing one is the ability to work well on a team.
“We need to be able to work closely and collaboratively with both our clients and our colleagues. That’s a key, fundamental characteristic that we’re looking for in all our employees – because on any of our biggest mandates, you could be working on teams of up to 20, 30, 40 people working across various departments”.
In perhaps a counterintuitive move, he says “it’s absolutely not essential to have an academic background in law or a law degree”.
O’Shaughnessy graduated with an undergraduate degree in history and English literature, although he later earned a postgraduate diploma in law from DIT. In lieu of an intern’s explicit legal knowledge, he says “commercial awareness” is a far more valuable trait.
“It’s the knowledge of both the work that Arthur Cox and other commercial law firms do, the type of sectors and fields that we would operate in and the type of clients that we would work for,” he says.
The firm is interested “more generally that they are up to date, to a relative degree, on the kind of hot topics commercially, politically, that are ongoing in Ireland and, to some extent, abroad … we would expect candidates to be relatively familiar with the main topics that are being discussed or reported on in the news”, he says.
“As part of our commitment to trainees and interns, we obviously help them with their commercial awareness as they progress through the firm … it is something that we look into more as part of the interview process and during their time here as an intern or trainee – to see a base level of commercial awareness and for that to improve [with] the more exposure they get to work here.”
O’Shaughnessy says trainees “are the biggest single cohort, numerically, within the firm” – between 45 and 65 start every year – and are “really important in terms of the atmosphere and the culture”.
“The firm itself, and I’ve seen this now as part of the trainee steering committee, really does invest in our trainees because they are, I suppose, our future leaders. If you look at the current senior leadership in terms of our council and partners, a very considerable proportion of them started off as trainees here,” he says.
“There is still a huge amount of my traineeship cohort with the firm over 10 years later, which I think is just an enjoyment of our traineeship and careers with the firm.”
At the start of her career journey is Femi Kasim, who is now one year into her graduate programme at AIB. She started the programme a year after finishing a master’s degree in project management at UCD’s Smurfit Graduate Business School.
She says her studies prepared her for the working world “a little bit”, especially for business theories and structures, “however, it is different putting it into practice – you’re working in a dynamic team with professionals, which I would say is different from when you’re in college”.
“From my experience in college, not everyone holds their weight. You definitely have some people who push more and some people who don’t push as much as they could do,” she says.
“What I’ve found on my team here is that everyone puts in the work, people even offer to help in places that might not be their expertise, but they can help out.
“It’s been a big shift for me, but, looking back on it, my first day here was a really good experience – you’re joining a huge organisation with a bunch of other really good graduates who are in the same place as you. You feel a sense of togetherness, a sense of community.”
Based at AIB’s Central Park office in Sandyford, Co Dublin, Kasim earned a place on the enterprise delivery programme and is now halfway through her second eight-month rotation.
“The people who do your orientation are so willing to help – everyone here at AIB is so willing to help and goes out their way to do so,” she says. “You can reach out to anybody who you need help from or want to learn from. They’re more than willing.”
AIB’s chief people officer, David McCormack, says the bank does not offer direct “return offers” for interns to become graduate recruits, although “from time to time, former interns may apply for graduate opportunities and be successful”.
“AIB’s internship programmes are designed to provide students with meaningful work experience, exposure to the financial services industry and an opportunity to develop new skills and professional networks,” he says.
Broadly speaking, corporate Ireland’s newest cohort is beginning their career journeys on shaky ground, with a summer internship becoming a lifeline for many recent graduates. The one-to-three month office stint is not necessarily a golden ticket to a long-term career, but it is a start.