Sony Pictures Entertainment reviews

In the TV PR department, Trainees are used and abused as "assistants". As a trainee, you do everything an assistant would do, but for four publicists instead of one. The system is quite convoluted. The PR staff have far too many shows to handle on their own, which means that they are stressed and overworked, which often times lead to them taking it out on the trainees. The publicists had no problem yelling at their trainees over the cubicles for the whole floor to hear when they made mistakes, and whatever little things the publicists couldn't handle would be passed on to the trainees to take care of. The Trainee program is basically an intern that works full time and gets paid only $12 an hour (as opposed to a p/t intern that gets paid $10), and have no benefits whatsoever. Instead of hiring full time assistants, they hire trainees for 6 months to a year with no opportunities to move up, and this supposedly saves the department money (even though they spend thousands on C list actors). I don't recommend the trainee program in the PR department unless you want to get underpaid for 50 hours of your life a week. The amount of work and the stress is simply not worth your time.

The Trainee system is a way for Sony to take advantage of recent grads instead of employing them with benefits or salary.