Skip to main content

Work Experience Works For Businesses

Would Your Business Benefit From an Extra Pair of Hands? 

Why Work Experience is the answer.

I'm often asked by schools and students if I can offer work experience, everything from a few days to summer long placements. At Naked Element we’ve always found the experience enjoyable and often learned as much about ourselves as the students did about our business. Bright, ambitious and free of those bad habits we all learn along the way in the world of work, work experience students can inject energy and enthusiasm into a business.

Many employers and businesses feel that they don’t have the time or resources to commit to a work experience placement, as much as they’d like to help a young person as they’re starting out,  but there are in fact lots of benefits to your business that make work experience a win-win situation for both student and business. Here’s just a few:

Early access to emerging talent

Lots of employers find that work experience programmes are a great way to recruit top talent straight from schools and colleges. Extensive research by City & Guilds shows that staff taken on following work experience placement are more effective, require less training, have more respect for their supervisors and have a greater ability to work in teams. Plus, many small businesses struggle to find young people who have even the most basic work skills and taking on a work experience candidate is a great way to test their skills before you commit to them.

Fresh Ideas

In most cases your work experience candidate will be eager to learn or they wouldn’t be with you in the first place. In an effort to impress they’ll be keen to get stuck in and maybe even bring something new to the table. Perhaps your company is lacking a social media presence that your work experience candidate can address?

Today’s youth are tomorrow’s consumers

Research has shown that “the consumer power of under 16 year olds has grown faster than that of any other age group. This has led marketers to identify three roles which young people can fill for businesses as ‘current consumers; influencers and future purchasers’ (Miller, 1998, p 316).” Work experience helps businesses and brands get up close and personal with their target markets or future consumers.

And of course…

Giving Something Back 

One of the biggest benefits of offering someone work experience is the chance to give someone a helping hand in the often overwhelming world of work. Businesses are placing more and more emphasis on their corporate social responsibility (CSR) and work experience is a great way to do your bit in up-skilling the next generation of workers. Enjoy the feel-good factor of giving someone an opportunity they might not have otherwise had and encourage their interests in business. You never know - they could be the next Gates, Branson or Jobs…

 If you’re interested in finding out more about how your business can benefit from offering work experience, get in touch with Paul on paul@nakedelement.co.uk who’ll help you get in touch with top talent.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv

Bloodstock 2009

This year was one of the best Bloodstock s ever, which surprised me as the line up didn't look too strong. I haven't come away with a list of bands I want to buy all the albums of, but I did enjoy a lot of the performances. Insomnium[6] sound a lot like Swallow the Sun and Paradise Lost. They put on a very good show. I find a lot of old thrash bands quite boring, but Sodom[5] were quite good. They could have done with a second guitarist and the bass broke in the first song and it seemed to take ages to get it fixed. Saxon[8] gave us some some classic traditional heavy metal. Solid, as expected. The best bit was, following the guitarist standing on a monitor, Biff Bifford ripped off the sign saying "DO NOT STAND" and showed it to the audience. Once their sound was sorted, Arch Enemy[10] stole the show. They turned out not only to be the best band of the day, but of the festival, but then that's what you'd expect from Arch Enemy. Carcass[4] were very disappoin

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th