Features: Get experience

Thought about your life after university lately? No? Then get thinking. With fewer jobs and more graduates, getting as much experience as you can is vital. Read on for ten reasons to do work experience.

Test out careers

Think you might want to work with children but not sure if teaching is for you? Look for a voluntary opportunity at a school and see whether those kids really are as cute as they seem. Work experience offers you a chance to find out whether specific careers are suited to you. It can also stop you making the mistake of jumping into a vocation that you could come to hate. 

Earn money

Yes, you heard right. Contrary to popular opinion, many work experience placements are paid, so that two-week vacation scheme will get you valuable experience and help you save towards your summer holiday.

Make a difference

Some of the best placements involve working for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which are companies with fewer than 100 members of staff. You can make a real difference working for a smaller company, and become involved in quite important areas of the business early on.

Be innovative

A placement is a great place to try out new ideas, providing your manager is happy for you to do so. As well as learning about the world of work, you are also there to help your employer, so be creative.

Make contacts

Whether careers advisers like to admit it or not, part of being successful is about knowing the right people. A work placement allows you face time with people involved in the industry you want to work in, as well as the opportunity to network. Those email addresses you save could be the key to getting a job once you graduate.

Put knowledge into practice

The best way to learn is to do. While you may think that all the theory you’ve been learning in lectures is setting you up for your career, there is no better way to test whether it has really hit home than trying it out in practice. For example, there is a world of difference between a would-be journalist mock interviewing a fellow student and actually interviewing a member of the public.

Pump up that CV

A CV boasting about your ten A* GCSEs, five A grade A-levels and a predicted first isn’t going to do it for employers these days. They want experience. They want practical skills. They want to know you can cut it away from the comforts of student life. A couple of placements shows your willingness to make things happen and can make all the difference when you come to apply for jobs.

Motivate yourself

Studying is a hard grind and it can sometimes be difficult to imagine where you’ll end up. A stint of work experience can help to motivate you to make that final push through university. The structure provided by work placements can also help to make you more disciplined.

Become commercially aware

A lack of commercial awareness is a common grumble from employers when it comes to recruitment. They feel that many graduates lack knowledge of how a business operates, what is expected of them and background information about their sector - all understandable when you’ve been studying. Work placements help you to fill in these gaps with first-hand experience.

Get a job!

Employers recruit graduates who’ve done placements with them. It benefits both parties. The graduate gets to work for a company that they’ve already tested out, while the employer will already know your strengths and weaknesses.