EHFA advertised an internship at its Brussels secretariat in September 2011. It was the fourth placement in the series the archive records, after internships advertised in 2008, 2009 and 2010.
The placements existed because the work was larger than the team that ran it. A secretariat of a handful of people serviced the board, the Standards Council and the technical experts, administered the accreditation programme, kept the register, organised the forums and the summit, and carried the reporting obligations of several EU-funded projects at once. Interns took on defined pieces of that work - research, preparation for meetings, and the administration any standards and accreditation programme generates - under supervision rather than in place of staff. None of it paused between meetings: the association's year ran to a general assembly, a forum, a summit and several project meetings, each with papers to prepare and follow up.
The value ran both ways. For a student or a recent graduate, the secretariat was a place to see how European policy is actually made: how a consultation works, how a project partnership is administered, and why a standards framework takes years rather than months. The 2011 notice is the last the archive holds, but the placements had followed the association's programme through its most active period. See EU projects and standards.