Work Experience Shouldn’t be Making Cups of Tea

Can you ever remember doing work experience? If you can, can you remember doing anything meaningful?

Having dredged my memory, I have a vague recollection of being hidden in the back corner of an office sorting files that no one cared about until the day I turned up. The problem was the owner of the business had promised my uncle months ago (and had subsequently forgotten) that he could provide me the required 2 weeks of boredom that every school asks for.

I’m sure a few of you will remember being in a musty old office every day for 2 weeks, relegated to making cups of teas until you were almost grateful to go back to school. At the end of it, you were none the wiser what you wanted to do with your life when school ended. At best, it put you off being stuck in an office.

A chance to inspire

Work experience should not have been like that and it shouldn’t be now. Instead of work experience being a chore for everyone involved, businesses should approach it as a chance to inspire and tap into fresh minds. Ideally we can help young people prepare for the world of work and potentially attract bright new talent when they leave school.

At Elemental Concept, we have had a work experience programme in place for a couple of years now. It started off badly as we recreated the modern-day equivalent of pointless filing — tagging our IT equipment. We soon realised that wasn’t fair or particularly useful to any of us — It also wasn’t consistent with who we strive to be as a company.

Creating value for our students

We decided to revamp the work experience programme to make it beneficial for all involved by trying to get our students to think, to set their own focus and solve real issues. In essence, we created a Student Entrepreneur Programme, inviting students to identify real problems facing society and find a way to solve them using technology. This allowed them to essentially define how they spent their fortnight’s work with us and enabled them to set their focus on something that meant something to them.

Our programme takes the students through a series of one-to-ones with different members of the team, from business strategists, to designers and developers, who outline parts of the process such as business modelling, story boarding and scoping solutions. At each stage, a team member shares their expertise and brainstorms with the student to give their concept more food for thought, direction and breadth. The student is then given a set amount of time to work the idea into an effective business model, with the support of our team, who are always available for questions. The end goal is for them to create a pitch deck to present their idea at the end of the week to the entire team.

Inspiring ideas

We’ve had some great ideas as a result of this initiative — from a dynamic safety app that would send emergency alerts to loved ones or the police, to a rewards-based revision app for students. We’ve also had a musical platform that encouraged seniors to be more active. The results have been eye-opening, and the ideas inspiring.

One problem statement particularly resonated with us and inspired us to take the concept further and design and launch a new application. This idea was introduced by Sam, who wanted to address the issue he saw with parents struggling financially to kit out their kids with new school uniform each year. Having seen that his parents had to pay over £250 a head a year on uniforms for him and his two siblings, Sam recognised this challenge, especially since these costs increased if one or all of them grew or lost anything. Sam saw that this was not just a struggle for his family but was affecting a lot of families, both in the UK and further afield.

During his 2-week work experience with us, he came up with the idea for a second-hand school uniform marketplace where schools could list donated items online and parents could browse and purchase as needed. This concept was developed further in Elemental Concept and ultimately resulted in Uniformd.

Sam’s vision has started coming to life: Parents of the few schools launched can rest easy, knowing that they can access affordable uniform year-round while the schools can efficiently sell donated second-hand uniforms, raising essential funds for their own initiatives. Meanwhile, use of the platform means that school communities are actively reducing their environmental impact. The use of the platform has also enabled schools to create a more COVID19 secure sales space, which has been essential during the pandemic.

We launched the MVP of this web application in July and currently have 7 schools in England on the platform with more being added. Feedback suggests people are seeing the clear benefits and impact such a system can have on a community. Sam’s simple work experience project has created a real solution that is having genuinely positive effects on families around the country and we are so proud to have enabled that.

The idea of work experience is to open the door to these young minds and allow them to see and feel how they might contribute to the world. And god forbid, maybe they could enjoy it too? At the end of the day, people are better at their jobs when they are passionate about what we do and by enabling these students to get involved at the heart level, thinking about the impact they could have and solving problems that mean something to them, we are giving them a lot more room to grow.

By offering better, real work experiences opportunities, employers can help open young people’s perceptions of the world of work and the realms of possibilities within it. Sam had never previously considered a career as a product designer, but thanks to his time at Elemental Concept, he now knows it’s an option and an exciting one at that. For us he and the other students have been an inspiration as they find and solve real problems we would never think of.

I would highly recommend making your own tea and tapping into the fresh minds that come into your world through work experience as you might just find an idea like Uniformd that inspires you to give something back to the community.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.