Why offer young people work experience?

What’s in it for me as an employer?
When employers take young people on work experience they often say that they are helping to put something back into the system, but why do they do it, and what do they really get out of it. Here are just some of the benefits of work experience that we see for employers:

Low cost development of staff

By supervising young people on work experience employees benefit from the opportunity to develop their interpersonal, presentation and team working skills. They quite often report gaining confidence and personal worth by contributing to the development of a young person. Work experience can also help to hone their supervisory skills and provide evidence towards in-house appraisal systems and external management qualifications. The process of planning, implementing, monitoring and evaluation of work experience programmes gives employees the opportunity to develop their management and coaching skills and provides an opportunity to widen their supervisory experience without the need for investment in expensive training programmes.

Increased motivation of employees

Companies participating in education-business link activities find that these activities increase the motivation of their workforce.

Improved and reinforced health and safety practices

Working through an induction with a young person and risk assessing their activities allows the organisation to review their current systems and reminds staff of the importance of health and safety practices.

Influencing the quality of future employees and developing recruitment channels

Employers help to improve the quality and preparedness of young people coming onto the labour market which can help to reduce recruitment costs in terms of attracting young people into part time and full time jobs. Work experience provides the opportunity to assess a potential employee over a period of time.

Real outcomes and innovation

Young people can undertake planned projects that staff do not have the time to manage. Young people ask questions and bring a fresh approach and perspective to routine tasks and often have new solutions or the time to research alternative approaches to workplace problems or practices.

Raising the community profile

Work experience placements are a great way to raise the profile of a company in the local community creating a positive image amongst young people, teachers, parents and other employers.

Providing a work placement for a young person requires hard work and commitment from an employer, but can be both rewarding and good fun!