‘Work experience, have you got any work experience? No no but WORK EXPERIENCE. Because you know your CV will be NOTHING without work experience!’ We’ve all had this conversation far too many times, whether it was with earnest yet guilt-tripping adults, or those slightly patronising ‘our CVs are soooo obese with experience that they’re practically dieting!’ fellow students.

The truth of the matter is: they’re right.  Work experience is important.  But they seem to always succeed in putting the emphasis in the wrong place – it’s not just for the CV, though that’s always lovely; it’s for the actual experience.

Because so few of us know what on earth we’re going to be when we ‘grow up’.  And how can we be expected to know?  At school, we’re effectively given a list of about four pathways to choose from: ‘would you like to be a) a doctor, b) a lawyer, c) a banker or d) a teacher?!’  So we just do our exams and leave, feeling slightly bewildered and thinking ‘oh dear, I don’t particularly want to shimmy-my-way into any of these categories!’

And then you reach the big-wide world and are hit by a massive realisation: you can do ANYTHING in the whole universe, not just a measly four things.  Right.  So where to start?!

It was at that point that I turned to WEXO.  I had absolutely no idea what on earth (or universe) I wanted to be, and here was a lovely ready-built website set out to help me discover just that. Plus, all the companies registered with WEXO have done so because they want interns – they want to give students the experience and to give them a glimpse of an entirely new field of work.  So instead of calling upon ‘a friend of a friend of a friend’s’ father, who probably owes that first friend a favour but who’d frankly rather eat wasps than actually have a student following him round for a couple of weeks, you should just get searching on WEXO!  Because they genuinely offer everything.

I’ve now had 2 fantastic and completely different ‘batches’ of work experience through WEXO, first at Quintessentially last year and this Summer at Frank PR (more on that in Part 2 next week!). This has helped me to gradually pin-point my perfect job, and I have officially become an ambassador for WEXO at university, hoping to spread the word to other students about its amazingness… Work experience doesn’t have to be a boring means to a ‘CV-decorating’ end; it can be really good fun if you go about it properly, helping to point you in the right direction (which is always good news!).

Nell

The three-weeks of work experience I did with Quintessentially Escape this September (through WEXO) were just brilliant!

Having done a couple of internships before, I’d prepared myself for a bit of slave-labour, some coffee-tray-carrying and manic filing of dusty old documents, but it turned out to be the exact opposite. The application process was incredibly simple, just a click and an optional cover letter, and then, after a casual interview, I was away… Subsequent emails from the guys at Quintessentially showed me that they actually wanted me to come, and that I would in fact be useful to them (which is what any intern hopes for!) and on my arrival, having been greeted by an office filled with friendly faces, I was told to pull up a chair at my own desk, and presented with a list of interesting tasks to perform; letters, research, phone calls, website work….everything! Therefore, by the end of the work experience I’d been given a real insight into most aspects of the company.

The problem with work experience is that you usually feel like a bit of a waste of space; you’ve written to a company in the hope of an internship, they’ve begrudgingly agreed, and they make it pretty clear throughout that you’re a hindrance rather than a help. But Quintessentially, like any company advertising for interns on WEXO, really wanted help, so I was constantly busy and felt useful throughout. Moreover, they talked me through anything I didn’t understand, and by the end of the three weeks I really felt I’d had a proper taste of company-life.

Some people view unpaid work experiences as a bit of a chore that you have to struggle through in order to decorate your CV, but this certainly wasn’t; though it involved a lot of work, it was fun and has definitely helped me to work out which career-path I’d like to head down in the future… Thank you WEXO!

Nell Fane