Feb 27, 2024 2:45:23 PM

Work Experience - In Person or Virtual? 💼

Work experience is highly valuable and allows the participant to learn about a company, career sector, or specific job role. As such, work experience offers an excellent hands-on training experience, that will enhance your CV, and allows you to apply knowledge learned in the classroom or through other super curricular exploration to the world of work. It is also a great way to develop personal skills and confidence.

Covid brought the dramatic expansion of virtual work experiences and industry insights with employers large and small realising the benefit of such offering. The opportunity to offer a high quality, high production value insight into their business without having to host people on site brought the ability to offer this experience to an almost unlimited number of participants no matter where they are located. The activities and experiences are much more representative of the work on offer in these companies as they are created to mirror real life situations and work flows without breaking client privileges, whilst ensuring data protection and privacy legislation is adhered to. It is also perhaps reflective of the modern way of working, in the office, at home or hybrid. These opportunities can be fixed in time and date or can be on demand and self-paced.

The developments in virtual work experiences does not mean that in person, physical experiences have disappeared completely and both opportunities can be very complimentary to one another. The school holidays are periods of time when employers look to offer these in person opportunities as they do not impact of academic progress and the summer in particular is a popular time. With this in mind, it means that applications and registration deadlines are fast approaching.

Below are just a few great examples of both online and in person experiences currently on offer. Apply for or start a range of both and allow the skills and knowledge gained to compliment one another. A great example of a combination of both working really well is in healthcare courses work experience is a compulsory element of the application but in-person opportunities are very limited. You can try a combination of virtual work experience to look at and gain insight into skills, knowledge and understanding required and compliment this with physical customer-facing / healthcare settings work or volunteering to apply this knowledge or to show practical application of key personal skills.

HSBC UK Work Experience Programme