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Work Experience
Work Experience
As part of the International Baccalaureate Careers Programme in Island School, students have the responsibility to self organize a work placement week. The senior students are studying a range of courses that place an emphasis on vocational education. The Work Experience week will provide them with a genuine opportunity to contextualize the theory that they are learning and hopefully develop their own skill set further.
Through the process of arranging their work experience they will be guided through these important communication and personal development skills:
Formal emails to speculative work experience employers
Organisational emails and phone conversations.
Interview practice
Effective communication attitude and body language in the work place
Work experience reflections process
Arranging work experience may happen through number of different avenues:
The perfect employer would be in the industry that you most wish to enter, and have found through online research, emailed with and had a wonderful productive week of work experience.
Personal contacts (family, friends family, friends) who do quite interesting jobs and are happy to have you with them in their places of work for a week.
You go to work with your parents because you haven't managed to arrange anything. This will still be highly useful at showing you the world of work.
Stage 2 is to prepare (but not send yet) a detailed email template that you will personalise for each company / contact that you write to.
We will study how to write speculative and formal emails, developing rules such as:
Rule 1. You never block send emails. Each must be sent individually, and to a contact. You may have to alter this template 30-40 times. Use your school email.
Rule 2. Always follow a structure. (see below).
Rule 3. Make sure you include all the information the recipient should need to make a decision and respond to you. They should not need to ‘work’ to respond.
Rule 4. All key information should be in the first paragraph and the title so they don't wast time.
Rule 5: Show you have researched that individual firm, and you really want to have a work experience with THEM.
Rule 6. This is the first ‘meeting’ of you so you must make a good impression! Clear, concise, ‘selling yourself’, and FORMAL. No spelling errors or poor grammar.
Organising the actual work experience has its own requirements of effective communication and self awareness, as will how to conduct themselves in the workplace during the actual work experience week.
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