A lot of people will adamantly give you the advice that you should never ever work for free.

That’s really bad advice, especially when you’re first starting out. I began my career over 30 years ago as an intern. I was 14 when I worked as a production assistant for a company in San Francisco called VideoWest. I learned a huge amount in a short time about real-world production and I haven’t looked back since.

Especially in a transitional economy like we have today in the entertainment industry, just having a resume and reel is not enough. Tens of thousands of kids are about to graduate from various film and animation programs and guess what – they all have resumes and demo reels. And for an employer, that’s not really enough information to determine how you’re actually going to fit in and work at a company.

There’s new evidence that internships work in all fields, not just visual effects or filmmaking…

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Employers recruited more than half their interns for full-time positions last year, the highest rate of intern-to-staff hiring in a decade, according to survey results released Thursday.

The survey showed that companies turn 58% of their interns into full-time employees.

"That’s the highest conversion rate we’ve seen since we started tracking this on an annual basis in 2001," said Marilyn Mackes, executive director for the National Association of Colleges and Employers.

The findings from the annual survey are a strong sign that interning could be a direct path to full-time work for students.

I’m in favor of visual effects artists being both compensated fairly and having fair working conditions but the people I know who work in the industry paid their dues and then often included doing internships or other free work early in their career. Furthermore, I know a lot of people who will still "work for free" to help a friend get a film made or other collaborative ventures. Nothing wrong with that, either.

The broad-brush idea that you should never work for free is just bad advice. Feel free to ignore it and build your career.