AIBU to think there should be organised work experience placement schemes for school students

[DuaNinja]

Starting to feel very frustrated trying to help DD to find a year 12 work experience placement. She completed a week in year 10 but this year the school want them to find something relevant to future studies and not just to go to work with your parents or similar. It sounds so easy in theory but in practice why would a random company want the hassle of dealing with a work experience kid? It would be great if there was a proper system in place for this. I believe in Ireland students undertake work experience in year 11 and have a vocational / transition year between lower exams and senior exams (apologies if this is not correct, I only have a very vague understanding of this). In my day the school had links with local businesses and we signed up tor a placement and the company we went to had a plan in place for us. DD's school offers no practical help, just links to websites about how to write a CV. So far she has sent her CV and a targeted email to 9 companies and has not had a single response. Also, if she does get a response, we know nothing about the potential companies offering the place. I would feel happier if I knew she was going somewhere that had been vetted in some way. Not that she is going to get a placement at this rate.

What do they expect you to do if your kid wants to be in the Navy or perhaps become a crane operator or a taxi driver?
Not everyone wants to be in an office, cafe, or factory.
And their chosen profession might not be in the same area or even country.

If they have already got PT jobs anyway they know about job huntimg, and turning up to work etc

Seems the majority don't find placements themselves, it's done through parents

Absolutely the cuts have meant a massive change but from an employer perspective, as others have said, work has changed. For us to take work experience in marketing/comms in a theatre, for the student to gain much actual experience we’d have to train them to learn at least 4 different bits of software. Yes we could ask them to draft social posts in word but that’s not giving them any actual experience of what it’s like. We can get them to sit and resize images but often they need showing how to do that. There’s so much ‘training’ to do to even help them get experience and our capacity is constantly so stretched that it becomes impossible. It’s not worth training someone for two days! Instead, our amazing engagement team arrange a ‘World of work’ week and the students run a ‘pretend’ theatre for the week with people from different teams come and speak about our roles and then the students present to us at the end of the week. This is organised by the school though so it’s a whole group from one school. Seems to work well

I have been a link between my DC's secondary school and my workplace - in the early days could get two weeks when they could come in and actually do something (by its nature every employee has DBS) and often would be something like phoning to remind of appointments. It developed into just doing a guided tour of the process from start to finish and a chat about what each person did (about an hour or two) so the student had something for their personal statement even if they had to do a little embroidery on what they actually did with us.

My local council has a programme, advertising on their jobs page and with a detailed outline in their ‘work for us’ section.

Might be worth a look local to you.

Our workplace is mostly remote and even if we could physically accommodate we’d have to somehow get them a laptop and logins for our software to do anything useful which just isn’t feasible

back in the day I tidied the office, did some filing and made tea. Times have changed. I agree it’s a concern

what about volunteering in a hospital?

NRTFT but in my school, we always tell students to get on the phone. Emails are often ignored or go into a Junk/Spam folder. Following up with a phone call shows determination. I mean this kindly but 9 emails is hardly working hard to find a placement. 99 would be more like it. Your DD needs to broaden the net. Our school also has a database of companies that offer placements.

Why discount smaller businesses? In addition to showing your DD much more of what actually goes on as they cover more business functions, they may also lead to holiday/p/t work.

Ask on local social media sites. Ask friends and colleagues if they know of any openings. Go to your local Connexions and ask them which businesses they have links with.

My DDs are in their mid-20s now. For their y12 Work Experience placements, DD1 went to a company near my DF's. He had a contact there, so asked if she could go in. They had never taken a work experience student but did it as a favour to DF. They now regularly take y12 students in their labs. DD2 went to the local university to work in the labs there. She is now a QC controller in a BioTech company. DD2 asked loads and loads of people and a chance conversation in a car park led to the offer.

Be proactive. Ask anyone and everyone. Don't be choosy.

we always tell students to get on the phone

You'd be amazed at the number of companies who don't publish their phone numbers these days. I struggle sometimes to even get a phone number for our suppliers.

Yeah you can’t call our company either. You can probably email but I’m not sure who would pick that up!

Connexions was disbanded in 2012. A few local councils kept the name for their local careers service, but in most of the country there is nothing. It's great that you had lots of opportunities in your local area but that's simply not a possibility unless you live in a big town or city with lots of potential employers and good transport. Even if you do have access to people working for big companies, there is often little scope for WE. I work for a $40Bn tech company - we have 800 employees in the UK. We have one office (in London), with 40 hot desks. How would we ever accommodate WE? Even our new graduate hires work remotely.

Same here - the only numbers and emails listed on our website are for sales, customer support, and partner support. We have a jobs website listing current openings that you can apply to but there is literally no way of contacting someone in recruitment other than by applying for a currently listed job.

It's intensely frustrating even from the inside - for example if you want to talk to someone in HR you have no choice but to file a ticket and then it will get picked up and assigned to an HR associate. Long gone are the days where you could just walk down the corridor and talk to someone in HR or Recruitment - they aren't even in the same country as us any more!

I've seen work experience from the side of my kids, the employer and the educational institution.
Your experience sounds great, but I'm pretty sure that there is no way that an under 18 could work in a hands on capacity in a chemical lab now. As one potential employer said "it will be my fault if they don't tie their shoelaces and fall over".
It needs to be made more attractive to employers eg generous tax breaks, cos it takes a lot of organising.

In our small city there is a university, a couple of colleges and numerous secondary schools all of which want students to undertake placements at some point. That's a lot of placements for a finite amount of businesses, not all of which are suitable. There is no central co-ordination, so businesses get endless requests. Add to that more remote working and the legal/safeguarding requirements and it is no surprise placements are hard to find. A more creative approach to getting exposure to the working world is needed.

I don’t know why work experience is still even a thing. It’s been a complete waste of time for the teens I know. Very few managed to get placements and those that did were doing things with no relevance to what they actually want to do as a career. Most businesses don't have the time or resources to babysit a teenager. There really is so little the teenager can actually be given to do that it’s no surprise that businesses don’t want to do it. I recently offered to take 2 teenagers for a 1-day experience on a great outdoor project where they could actually benefit and was told by the school that it HAD to be more than 1 day. That was all I could offer without a huge impact on the people who are actually trying to work! It’s time to stop it altogether.

The council don't offer places, the library doesn't offer places (and is only open a few hours a few days a week), the school don't have any connections, what is "connexions"? There are no phone numbers for many companies, if you're lucky there is s general email address. We don't live near a hospital, a college or a university. Most people wfh most of the week. DD has continued to send her CV out this week to companies of all sizes but she has still not had even an acknowledgement that her email has been received from anyone. We know she can do some virtual placements but it's not quite the same.

About ten years ago I got roped into helping do mock job interviews for Y12 kids. There was one who expressed an interest in finding out more about business development in general and marketing in particular to explore as a career option, but she knew little about those roles and had no connections.

At the time I was an interim Commercial Development Director at an NHS Trust, so it seemed obvious and easy for me to help out. I proposed that the girl in question spent a week shadowing me. Nobody else had to lift a finger.

My colleagues put up every obstacle I could think of, and several that I couldn't. I was told that we couldn't have people without DBS checks (not true; as a contractor I didn't have one); that we couldn't employ an under 18 (not true, besides the obvious that we wouldn't be employing her); that there was nothing in the budget (er...); that we couldn't have a non-employee with access to patient data (she wouldn't have access) and so on. What they really meant was "we can't be arsed with this and if you do it will show us up."

I didn't used to be possible for an under 18 year old to get a dbs check.

Although I have seen some teenagers around my workplace recently - who is that I ask. It's X's son or daughter (one of the bosses) - so work experience does happen for the select few

When you say 9 emails is hardly working hard to find a placement - actually the work that has gone into locating the companies that suggest on their websites they might take work experience, researching the company sufficiently to be able to write a cover letter about why you want to work there, tailoring a cv - it’s actually a huge amount of work for what - one week of work experience! The advertised schemes in particular ask for a lot of self serving “why us” stuff, and then don’t reply. I don’t think this is a great introduction to the working world/or maybe it is as a reminder of how tough it is and actually nobody can even be bothered to write back an email anymore to say thanks but no thanks.
my year 12 ds has applied for both advertised schemes and also sent off speculative emails with cover letters. One got back to say they would have something for him - they then didn’t, he chased it and chased it and then after a month they told him they had nothing. Rejected from another, no reply from anyone else. There are often no numbers to call.
is this a good use of anyone’s time? I have told him to call a day on it.
he already has a part time job as a lifeguard so has work experience, but is interested in a career in construction/sustainability.

It can be a box ticking exercise for the school too, but I agree that students being encouraged to do it for themselves is where the real value lies - especially if they come from a background of everything being "someone else's job"

You could even argue it's more valuable then the work experience itself, in that the placement will pass but the skills leaarned in getting it can last a lifetime

I don’t think there are 99 businesses in our area, we live in a small village. When I say we have discounted small businesses I mean IT companies often have lovely websites, as that is the field they are in, but when we check the addressed they are often residential roads with " The Studio" in the address, as in, the spare room / garden office. I really can't see some of these people working on their own from home wanting to take a teenager on for a week. Also, I don't think I'd want her to go somewhere like that either, unless it was someone we knew.

@Malbecfan "Be proactive" - we are
"Don't be choosy.- we aren't

It's pretty difficult to get meaningful WEX except through your parents' contacts

That was us last year. DD will study history and applied at around 25-30 museums and historic places, we live in London.

One of the large museums came back but she didn't get a place, they offer only a handful of places per year and competition was fierce. It didn't help that she was sent emails from various departments back and forth, it was actually quite unprofessional done.

80% either didn't do it, or only for college students, were already fully booked a year in advance or only offer it for local schools. The other 20% didn't bother replying at all.

The school's career advisor was only helpful when DH wrote a fairly harsh email about the pressure they put on the children without offering help. She actually was apologetic when she realised what DD already did without any success.

In the end DD helped out at a primary school in the same trust. She got glowing reviews from the teachers she worked with about her attitude to work, friendliness and professionalism. No wonder, DD helps with the Beavers for the last 3 years at that point but it was miles away from what she envisioned for her future.

My dc had to find several separate weeks of work experience from years 10 to 12. I would think it helps if you have an interest in the business. What is she interested in doing long term? Nobody wants to host a disinterested person. But many would be happy to host someone who is interested in that area/industry and will be asking questions, engaged, willing to help.

Secondly, has she put together a CV to accompany the emails? They don't have much to put on but you can put the GCSEs, the A levels being studied, interests, achievements, any voluntary work. Tailor it to the area of work she!s applying to.

Give her help and proof read it before sending it off.

If you give an idea of location you never know someone might have a specific idea.

Dd22 wanted to be a pharmacist, 1 week of working in a community pharmacy - stocking shelves, filling doset boxes and taking payment at the till whilst listening to the nasty comments the pharmacists and other staff were subjected to put her off. Now a teacher. 🤣😂no abuse there🤣😂
Dd24 didn't know what she wanted to do, but thought about working with kids. She did work experience in a primary school. Now mainly works with SEND, tutoring.

So work experience can be useful in many ways. They both found their own and it took a couple of months of contacting places. It didn't help that my youngest was summer born and too young for a lot of employers.