NEW Blue Book traineeship in interpreting in 2024

The Blue Book traineeship scheme is organised twice a year by the traineeship office in DG HR (Directorate General for Human Resources and Security) for around 1.000 trainees per session. This in-service training aims to provide young university graduates with first-hand experience of the inner workings of the European Commission in particular, and of the EU institutions in general; it offers 5-month paid traineeships (1,376.89€ per month) to selected candidates.

From October 2024 DG SCIC (Directorate General for Interpretation) will be able to offer two BB traineeships in interpretation to candidates with one of the following A languages: Croatian, Maltese, Danish, English, Bulgarian, Swedish, German, Estonian, Finnish. Their language combination as conference interpreters should correspond to the language profile required for their respective Language Unit as listed here: https://europa.eu/interpretation/doc/language_profiles.pdf

We seek young graduates (preferably) with a background in conference interpreting at an MA or BA level, with a keen interest in the interpreting profession and its current developments, looking for a career in the EU institutions.

The selected candidates will have the opportunity to practice their interpreting skills in real interpretation environments. The trainees will receive a dedicated programme of interpretation activities and administrative tasks and will be supported, in the interpretation section, by staff interpreters as trainers. They will get experience in conference interpreting in a variety of meetings as provided by DG SCIC interpreters and will become acquainted with operational matters linked to the work of a conference interpreter at DG SCIC.

They will also collaborate with administrative staff in unit SCIC.B1 (Talent Development) for tasks related to the support of the training of future interpreters (e.g., organisation of pedagogical assistance sessions, virtual classes, speech repository recordings). At the end of the traineeship, they will be expected to have reached the level of proficiency required to work as conference interpreters at the meetings serviced by DG SCIC. The objective would be for the trainees to pass the freelance interpreter accreditation test to then be added to the common freelance list.

Procedure: The SCIC programme will be organised in the context of the general call for administrative trainees of the BB scheme, the application dates of which will be between 19 February and 15 March 2024. This will be followed by a general computerised screening and a preselection of all candidates, subject to an indicative quota per nationality. The preselected candidates will be put into the ‘Blue Book’. Around June, all Directorates General will publish their ’vacancy notes’ specifying what they are looking for and what they can offer. SCIC will publish two vacancy notes for the interpreting traineeships. It will be up to the interested candidates to select and apply for these vacancies. SCIC will then select the most suitable candidates with the A languages and language combinations mentioned above.