Work Experience

Work Experience Program

Whilst traditional work experience is still successful for some students and businesses, we believe that some innovation is required in this area, particularly for the FIPS sectors.

The FIPS work experience program was designed to provide students with a structured week of work in which they can experience multiple different businesses.

We believe this program can be used for secondary students, college students and university students. Businesses will need to tailor their approach depending on the age of the students they are hosting.

Application Process

As places will be limited, students will be invited to apply for the program. The application will give students the opportunity to say which FIPS sectors they are interested in and why. They will also provide details about their project.

Project

A theme will be selected for the week and students will work on a project which runs with this theme. For example, the theme could be a new business is launching and needs to use various services from the FIPS sectors. Students would come up with an idea for a new business they would like to launch. As they move around the different businesses throughout the week, they would work on this project, learning how each one provides its services to a new business.

At the end of the week, students will present back to some representatives from the businesses they’ve spent time with to talk about what they have learnt and how it has helped their project.

Structure

Businesses and students will be grouped together in fours and the program will last five working days. On the first day, each student will go to a different business, rotating round to the next business on each day until they’ve been to all 4 businesses. The business can structure the day as they wish, however, they must ensure they use some of the time with the students to work on the project.

On the final day of the week, the students will ‘work from home’ and put together and complete their presentation. As Zoom and/or Teams have become part of everyday work for many of us, the presentation on the final day will be done virtually, to give the students an experience of this.