Simon's job log: 3

Simon Frost graduated from the University of Bradford in 2006 and currently works for an IT company in North Yorkshire.

Work experience from the other side

There was, a while back, an advert for a certain brand of toffees, which I probably shouldn’t mention by name. In it, a grown man remembers being given one of the said toffees as a child by his granddad. The advert ends by saying ‘Now I’m the granddad…’ and so the cycle of grandparents giving sweets to their grandchildren continues.

Well, that’s what I feel like saying when it comes to work experience students. Having gone on work experience myself when I was in my teens, now I’m on the other side of the fence, looking after our own work experience students, just like somebody else did when I was that age.

So, as you may have guessed, we’ve just taken on another work experience student. I say another, because we seem to take on a disproportionate share of the students in our area. In the last one and a half years that I’ve worked here, we’ve taken on six students for two-week work experience placements. In a small company of ten people, taking on two extra students increases our workforce by a fifth, yet we seldom see any benefit out of it.

By ‘we’ I mean the development team, who are usually lumbered with them. That might sound a bit unfairly negative, but in my experience, the quality of the students we get is really a mixed bag. It is easy to tell when a student has been placed with us on a last-minute basis because no-one else could take them or because they needed a placement and didn’t really care about where it would be.

Maturity is also something that tends to vary quite widely. Sometimes, me and my colleagues in the development team can act more like children than adults, whereas some of the students we get tend to behave more like adults than children! Most, however, are quite introverted and quiet and generally just don’t have a clue about working in a business.

What can they do?

Occasionally, however, you do get the odd student who actually has an interest in IT and what we do. These students are generally the easiest to work with, because they need the least hand-holding. They have a natural enthusiasm and interest in our work, which is usually why they applied to us in the first place. That means they can be given a mini-project and be left to get on with it.

Finding enough work to fill two weeks is a lot more difficult than it sounds and we always end up struggling. We used to give them the task of setting up their own blog using WordPress, but that has a famously (at least to geeks like me) easy one-step installation process. So that will only keep them occupied for a day at most. Then comes the usual suggestion to design a theme for their new blog. Fortunately this is more open-ended, we can specify they spend a day researching design ideas. Inevitably, despite our best intentions, they can end up a bit bored.

It’s a give and take situation. Unfortunately, in the modern business world, it is very noble and charitable to take on work experience students, but we simply don’t have the time to give them the same amount of attention they would expect from a school environment. However, if the student seems genuinely interested, I easily slip into a kind of mentor role. If what we give them to do leaves them indifferent and they are more interested in their mobile or checking their MySpace or Facebook page every five minutes, then I don’t feel as guilty by giving them more attention.

So, comparing my time on work experience with my experience of handling students today, nothing much seems to have changed, though it’s interesting to look at it from both sides of the fence. I can sympathise with the business that took me on and with the people who had to find work for me as well.