Virtual Work Experience Week

Navigating working life during a global pandemic has of course had its challenges, mainly for us it has been the lack of interaction with our colleagues and clients – however Microsoft Teams has saved the day, every day, enabling us to arrange video calls and even a virtual pub every Friday to keep the chat and camaraderie up!

We strive to be a people first company, so we wanted to keep our promise to the local schools and carryout our annual work experience program, but this year developing it virtually to ensure the students were still able to gain experience in the ‘real world’, and you couldn’t get more real than where we all are now.

The students wanted to gain a sense of direction, insights into working life, develop skills and see how different roles combine so we developed a program that covered all areas of the business in terms of functions and managing day to day. The schedule was set up very similar as if they were in our offices – each department had a slot where they would present and set a task for the students to present back. This included:

• Project Management
• Operations
• Software Development
• Testing
• Running a business
• HR
• Marketing

It was really-important to us as a team to ensure that the students got as much out of the week as they possibly could – especially having lost out on so much already during this time. Being virtual means we have no location issues and our students can be involved from anywhere.

The week has been hugely well received by our first set of students, parents and schools.

Rebecca Cleare, our Head of HR set this up with two of our local schools and has had the following feedback: The virtual work experience program worked even better than I anticipated. It has given all who worked on it a great sense of satisfaction to be able to continue to do something for our community during the health crisis. The students were articulate, enthusiastic and smart, a real credit to themselves. We adapted our normal program, so other than some time spent doing this, our team were involved as normal during the week. I am very happy with the success of it.

If you would like further information on how you get get involved please get in touch.