What Is Your Child Doing For Work Experience - Will It Be Worthwhile?

Summer term sees Year 10’s venturing out into the world of work for Work Experience placements. Some will benefit from the experience and return enthused and engaged, others will have found it a disappointment and dull.

Students try work placements partly because they have to and partly because they are genuinely interested in finding out more about the area of work they are interested in. In the legal field, students often arrive with a vision of LA law, or Callista Flockheart and big Corporate lunches at the forefront of their minds. My first task is to tell it to them how it is. Law is a business every bit as much as Sainsburys or Debenhams. It covers, IT, HR, marketing, accounts, finance and facilities management for a start. I encourage the students to see the lawyer as a part of a bigger machine which is the sum of its parts.

There have been some recent questions raised over the effectiveness of work experience for Students and the difficulties around finding worthwhile placements. Finding good placements are hard given that there are many Students looking at the same time and it may well become harder with the increasing number of Diploma Students look for practical work experience as an integral part of their course which requires students to be in the work place for 10 days. For the provider it is not always easy to find a way of integrating a year 10 pupil into a busy business environment. It is simply not possible to always give them responsible tasks outside of their abilities or understanding. It is possible however to give a flavour of the work environment and to give them an exercise or project that encourages them to think outside their comfort zone. If they are entering a commercial environment, they can be encourage to think commercially by evaluating what they are doing and what their contribution is in the wider scheme of things. We all know that the person who carries out a task that enables others to carry out theirs, is valued highly be it, checking facts and figures, asking why something is done in a certain way, or providing a life saving cup of tea.

The success of good work experience is preparation by the employer, the school and the student. If the student arrives with an understanding of what they want to get out of the placement they will have a focus which is immediately recognised and appreciated by the employer. The employer needs to know what they are going to do with the student ahead of time. At Foot Anstey we take our commitment very serious and have a structured programme for our students.

Work Experience is a great opportunity for students to obtain a flavour of the great world of work. It will have elements that they enjoy and elements that they do not, but that is rather the point. Work is full of highs and lows, a mixture of the interesting and the mundane. What work experience gives that cannot be taught in Schools, is exposure to the work that they will be, or are about to be entering. Given that these students are all our futures, it is only right that where we can we offer them the change to find out at first hand what the world of work has in store for them.

For more information about work experience with us click here

Published 08/06/2009. The author of this article is Julia Green