Check upcoming open days and book your place arrow
Career Advice

Work experience: how to find it and get the most out of it

It’s never too early to start getting work experience. Our student blogger Lily shares some tips on how to make the most of it when you’re there...

Lily Hollowbread
by Lily Hollowbread
Last Updated:
23 Jan 2024

Work experience is invaluable, without a doubt. It provides a taster of a career you could have after your seemingly endless years in education, providing you with a crucial insight that might one day stop you from making the biggest mistake of your life (unlike your supervisor Phil in marketing, who dreamed of being a pilot and trawls the office whistling ‘Come Fly With Me’). Now aside from Phil’s desk, littered with its subtle references to what could have been (including his diecast model Boeing and British Airways mouse pad), ensuring you enable yourself to discover the pros and cons of your potential career is essential.

Placements are hard to find, often brutal to compete for and sometimes challenging to complete, but they offer so much in the way of knowledge that you must be proactive in getting them.

How to choose where to do work experience


First you have to start with the ominous question posed to you by every School Careers Guidance Counsellor in the land: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”. It’s perfectly fine not to emerge from the womb wanting to be a doctor, but it’s not okay to follow your friends or lack of gumption into a field that doesn’t interest you purely because it’s easier. Brainstorm your ideas into fields. The transferable skills you can acquire will be identical across all of them, whether shadowing an MP or spending hours laminating sheets at a local primary school (the latter of which I came to enjoy as a means of relief from the boredom of having nothing to do all day during one placement).

If you are genuinely clueless, it’s a good idea to get experience in well respected industries like finance, law, politics, etc. Any placements in these areas will certainly stand out on your CV (especially if you’re being compared to an applicant that merely shadowed a retail assistant for a week).

How to secure a placement


When enquiring it’s essential to be polite and professional, but you should also be firm – don’t shy away from using dynamic language, but in the same light respect the fine line between confidence and arrogance. A strong, professional candidate is more likely to get a reply than a cocky, entitled candidate.

The biggest issue with modern day communication systems such as emailing is that it’s easy to ignore (or even just delete). Therefore you have to be persistent; call the office and don’t let yourself be ignored. A tip I learned at Credit Suisse was to avoid using ‘work experience’ explicitly in an inquiry email; instead, substitute this blacklisted phrase with ‘work shadowing’. The word ‘experience’ implies you wish to use the company’s online systems in your time, which can be difficult to accommodate in areas such as finance and law where confidential information is at stake.

Steps to take after securing your placement


When you secure a placement, it’s a good idea to practise a ‘dry run’ of your route to work, particularly in cities such as London where a simple five minute walk according to Google Maps can turn into a twenty minute meltdown when your trusty phone suddenly denies you GPS. I experienced this on my first day at a London law firm, which didn’t make for a fantastic first impression when I burst into the board room hot, flustered and furious at the layout of London’s labyrinthine streets to be met with bewildered stares.

The stressful journeys home, particularly on a commuter crammed London tube, can be eased by taking a notebook with you to take down the activities you took part in that day and what transferable skills you gained from them. Did you hone your problem solving skills when Janice from HR rejected the tea you’d begrudgingly made her because it had two sugars in it by making her a new tea? Of course you did.

Above all else you should use your work experience placements to perfect your professionalism. Take care not to complain about having to squabble with the Post Office Clerk for the ten passport forms you’d been sent out to get on an errand and always keep a smile on your face. Ask what more you can do and remember to be gracious and polite; you are putting the names of these institutions on your CV which is a favour to you, not to them. By being helpful and willing to get your hands dirty, so to speak, you could come out of these placements with a shining reference or invitation to come back for the hallowed paid work experience, where they actually give you money to search London for a glass hammer and tartan paint.
 

Next

- Struggling to find a part-time job

- Eight charts that perfectly sum up the life of a sixth form student
 

Similar articles