You’ve read the success stories. The motivational posts, the “I started from zero” threads, the LinkedIn victories. Everyone loves a good glow-up narrative. This is not that. This is the story of what happens before the success — if it even comes. This is the part people skip. The part I lived twice.
Unpaid “trainings and internships” have quietly become the entry fee for jobs across Pakistan’s call centre and marketing sectors — dressed up as an opportunity, sold as a test of commitment, and rarely questioned by the people going through them. I didn’t question it either. Not the first time.
I passed the interview. That felt like something. Like a door opening. What waited on the other side was a cramped room, a night shift of nine hours, and seven other trainees who, like me, had no idea what we’d walked into. There was no trainer. Let me say that again — a call centre, running a training programme, with no actual trainer.
So what did we do for seven to eight hours a night? We scrolled. We overthought. We crammed scripted dialogues, chasing an American accent we’d been told we needed, without anyone explaining why or how. Just memorise. Just repeat. Just perform. Somewhere around the fourth night, one of the other trainees said it out loud — half joking, half not — that we were being trained to sound like someone else before anyone had bothered to ask if we could actually do the job. No one laughed. We just went back to repeating the lines.
It reminded me of Animal Farm — specifically the sheep, the goats, and the horses, bleating the Seven Commandments over and over without understanding a single one. We were not being trained. We were being conditioned.
And after seven nights of this — after we’d given our sleep, our time, our unpaid labour — most of us were not recruited. The decision came down to one man, one moment, no criteria. Just a judgment call. That was it. That was the process.
What nobody accounts for is what it costs to even be in that room. I was unemployed. No income, no safety net, just the quiet math of a jobless person trying to look presentable and reliable for a company that wasn’t paying them. Transport to and from the centre for seven nights. Data to stay in touch, to keep applying elsewhere in case this falls through. Sometimes food, because a nine-hour night shift on an empty stomach is its own kind of training. None of it was reimbursed. None of it was even acknowledged. I was spending money I did not have, on the hope of a salary I was not guaranteed.
I should have learned my lesson. But desperation has a way of making the next opportunity look different from the last. So I walked into another seven-day unpaid training — this time at a marketing agency.
I’ll be honest: the work itself pulled me in. Learning about campaigns, brand strategy, client pitches — it felt creative, even exciting. We were handed a mock client brief on day two — build a launch pitch, no budget, no brand history, figure it out — and for a few hours, I actually forgot this was unpaid. For a few days, I thought this was the one that would actually count for something.
But the story rhymed with the last one. No dedicated trainer. Senior staff floated in between meetings to drop knowledge on us, more as a courtesy than a commitment. The sessions were uneven, the feedback nonexistent, and the structure held together with good intentions and nothing else. And the second training cost me the same way the first one did — commute, data, the small daily expenses that add up fast when nothing is coming in to replace them. Different company, same arithmetic.
Then came the final evaluation. We presented our pitches to a small panel, the kind of room where you can feel who’s actually listening and who’s waiting for their turn to speak. We did not fall short on skill or effort. What undid us was a senior employee — one comment, casually delivered, clearly aimed at impressing the boss in the room. Something dismissive, something that took four seconds to say and cost us seven days. She was not assessing us. She was performing for someone above her. And we were the collateral.
This is not an isolated experience, and it is not a small one. Labour protections in Pakistan rarely extend to “training” periods at all — the word itself does the legal work of exempting a company from paying you. Every company that runs unpaid training owes its candidates, at minimum, a certified trainer, a defined curriculum, and clear evaluation criteria set before the process begins — not invented at the last moment by whoever is in the room. Training hours should be fixed, communicated upfront, and, if unpaid, strictly time-bound. Candidates are not free resources. They are people investing their time — and, often, money they don’t have — in the promise of a fair shot.
Unpaid training is not always an investment in your future. Sometimes it is just free labour dressed up in the language of opportunity. And the most exhausting part is not the long hours or the night shifts or the cramming — it is the hope. The genuine belief that this time, it will count.
There is a pattern here worth naming: no structure, no accountability, and at the end, subjective last-minute decisions by people who never had to sit in that room with you. The cost is entirely yours. The risk is entirely yours. But the power? Never.
Not to be bitter. Not to discourage anyone from trying. But if one person reads this and stops blaming themselves for not getting recruited after unpaid weeks of effort — then this was worth writing. Sometimes the system is broken. Sometimes you did everything right, and it still did not work, because the process was never designed to be fair.
If you’re in one of these rooms right now — cramming lines you don’t understand, spending money you don’t have, waiting for a verdict someone will hand down in thirty seconds — this is for you: it is not a reflection of your worth. It is a reflection of a process built without you in mind.
You are not on the animal farm. You do not have to keep memorising commandments you are never allowed to question.
Know your worth before you walk into that room.
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Iqra Nawaz is an English Literature graduate, writer, and critic of social issues based in Punjab, Pakistan. Her work spans literary criticism, book reviews, and commentary on social issues, with particular attention to gender dynamics in Pakistani society. She contributes to Stratheia and continues to build her independent writing practice.
