There are internships – and then there is le stage: the unique system of gap semesters run by the French Grandes Écoles as part of their masters programmes, which can make other placements look distinctly lightweight.

These corporate internships are a vital and normally compulsory element of masters programmes in the Grandes Écoles, and reflect the schools’ history.

“The French Grandes Écoles were created by entrepreneurs,” says Patrice Houdayer, dean of academic programmes at EM Lyon. “So from the beginning, their main aim was not just to develop academic competencies but also to make sure that future graduates would be well prepared for companies. It’s part of our DNA to make sure our students will be high potential people for business.”

Details of timing, length and flexibility vary according to the school, but in general students will do as many as three internships during or immediately after the academic programme.

At HEC Paris, for example, the minimum requirement to graduate is 30 weeks of internship or one year of professional experience. Almost all students take a year’s break between their second and third years of studies, during which they may do up to three internships.

The French approach to internships developed 20 years ago in a convergence of interests between employers, students and faculty, says Delphine Manceau, dean for the Grande École programme at ESCP-EAP.

“Students were having trouble finding really interesting internships with a good level of responsibility when [the placements] were short. In just two or three months, there is time to understand [the company’s] cultures and procedures, and then it’s over,” she says.

For their part, says Prof Manceau, companies were saying that a two-month internship simply amounted to an observation period, during which students could not be given responsibility or participate in decision making. Meanwhile, professors wanted students to spend longer with companies so they could bring their deeper experiences of business life back to the academic programme, making the courses more interesting for both student and faculty.

The longer internships offer a lot more to students than the mere application of classroom theory to a practical problem at their chosen company.

“They have real responsibilities with the company, and they can really test whether the career they are considering is good for them or not,” says Prof Manceau.

A further advantage, says Prof Houdayer, is the insight it gives students into the skills they should develop.

A student doing a first internship may discover that the job requires skills that he or she does not have – such as financial skills for brand management – and on returning to school will choose specific courses to fill the gap.

“The stage will push you to get specific knowledge that you would not have thought about if you had not had this [opportunity],” he says.

When it comes to applying for a job, the professional experience gained on these internships gives students a true advantage over rivals from universities where such secondments are not compulsory, says Françoise Quédeville-Marmey, academic director for the specialised masters in strategy and management of international business at Essec.

“The most important internship is the one done at the end of the learning period,” she says. “Firms consider it as a trial, a test before recruitment.” This year almost 60 per cent of Prof Quédeville-Marmey’s students were taken on by the host company at the end of this final field project.

The stage system is now so entrenched in France that each school receives thousands of internship offers from the big names in the French corporate world. Some big French financial companies can offer up to 1,000 internships a year.

It is not hard to see why companies like the system. Just as students can test their career options, so companies can give the students more assignments and assess each of them more precisely, says Prof Houdayer. And if graduates are finally recruited, their previous professional experience and depth of specific knowledge allows them to become “rapidly operational”, says Philippe Labrousse, careers adviser for the Essec masters programme. Elsewhere – in the UK, for example – a graduate trainee programme would be required to compensate for new recruits’ lack of previous professional experience.

Inevitably, the stage system is open to abuse. Interns do not have to be paid as much as normal employees, and some companies can take advantage of this willing pool of cheap labour, offering internships of up to a year, which are never followed up with job offers. In some cases, interns have had little contact with management over the course of their placement; their final task before leaving has been to spend three weeks training the next intern – who may be in the same boat a year later.

Following a report by a group of politicians, the government took action last year to improve this situation. While falling short of enshrining the pre-recruitment aspect of the internships in legislation, the new system reinforces the pedalogical thrust of the placement, and its role in developing the student. There has to be a training agreement and a clear description of tasks and duties, and a mentor within the company. The duration is limited to what has been set out in the curriculum’s regulations, and to a maximum of six months if nothing is mentioned. A charter of good practice has been agreed, with input from students, politicians and companies.

Whether the stage system will catch on in masters programmes outside France is a moot point. Prof Manceau believes it could become more widespread as the MSc standard develops across Europe, because it enables students to confront what is taught in the classroom with business reality.

In one sense the stage already has gone international – French Grande École students are travelling worldwide for their internships. Their host companies, however, tend to be foreign subsidiaries of French companies, or multinational companies that are familiar with the French system.

In some countries, such as Japan, long internships are difficult to arrange, says Prof Houdayer – even if the student speaks French, English and Japanese.

The administrative burden of the system on a business school is not to be taken lightly, either. Essec received 17,000 internship offers last year, says Prof Quédeville-Marmey, and needs a staff of 20 to manage this inflow and help students find the placement that suits them.

Pick’n’mix

The experiences of two masters students at EM Lyon, Albane Chassaigne who has just finished and Quentin Bordage who completed the course last year, are typical examples of how the stage system works in the Grandes Écoles – building readiness for a career through the combination of internships and the academic programme.

Mr Bordage, 25, did three internships before, during and after his two years on the masters programme. “I gradually constructed my path in order to fit with my personality, alternately going on internships and coming back to school,” he says.

At the end of the bachelor programme, his first year of three at EM Lyon, Mr Bordage spent six months at a hotel in London, building and implementing a marketing plan, promoting the brand to local businesses and improving the service quality. As he points out, students do not have a lot of knowledge to offer after only a year of business school basics, but even so: “This was a real entrepreneurship experience as I was given a lot of autonomy.”

Back at school, Mr Bordage felt the need to develop his financial skills through specific classes, following up at the end of another year with three months at a big accountancy firm, evaluating accounting performance of SME and big companies in different sectors. In such a company, says Mr Bordage, you don’t have a lot of independence, but you are autonomous on the tasks you are given. Three months was enough, he says: “I found this job was not the place for me to blossom out.”

Even so, the time was not wasted, and in his final year Mr Bordage strengthened his knowledge on strategy, with a focus on finance and marketing, as a future in strategic consultancy became an increasingly attractive option for him. His final internship last year – nine months at a small consultancy – confirmed this, but Mr Bordage wanted to join a larger company with more opportunities.

After a shortened three-month evaluation period that took into account the previous internship, Mr Bordage was appointed a consultant at Hemeria, the Paris-based strategy consultancy, in January. “I immediately felt efficient as I already knew how to work,” he says.

Ms Chassaigne did not have a precise idea of the field of management in which she would like to work when she began her masters. But after some courses, she decided to specialise in human resources, achieving this by choosing several relevant courses and by doing her internships in human resources departments.

She did two internships, both lasting six months. During her first placement she mostly worked for a human resources project concerned with the management of mobility, careers and skills. That was very interesting, she says, but for the second internship she decided to find something more operational and more general, in order to have a view of human resources that was as large and as complete as possible. The offer of an internship by Electricité de France fitted the bill.

This internship, in the human resources department of the group’s financial directorate, offered a variety of tasks. For example Ms Chassaigne participated in a process used by EDF to spot potential high-flyers, looked after careers and mobility software, organised a campaign to raise public awareness of the integration of handicapped people in the group, and did more administrative tasks.

“I learnt a lot by doing these tasks,” she says. “I had the chance to have a manager who gave me, on the one hand, a lot of autonomy, but on the other hand gave me a lot of her time. I could speak with her whenever I wanted and I also learnt a lot from her experiences.”

Ms Chassaigne, who is now looking for a job in a human resources department, says the internship allows students to understand how the theories learnt at school are applied in reality. “The theoretical part of the programme is very important because without it we wouldn’t be able to profit so much from what could be learnt through an internship,” she says.

Or, as Mr Bordage puts it: “The biggest advantage we have at EM Lyon, for me, is that we are taught the entrepreneurial spirit that gives you tools to be proactive, which is very appreciable for a company.”