Work Experience

All teens will end up doing some kind of work experience during their school or college years. I am yet to do mine, as I am still only in year 10 and at my school we do it in year 11. As I want to be an author or a designer, my dream placement would be in a publishers or design studio. I would also quite like to work with environmentalists. However, these positions are probably very hard to come by and I am not sure what other, more common positions appeal to me.                                                   
That is the problem with work experience. At our age and skill level, we are very limited in what we can do. If your chosen career is some thing that is suitable for work experience, that's great, but if it isn't, then your placement will probably have little relevance to what you want to do in the future. For those people, is there much benefit to work experience? Apart from having a better idea of what it is like to work (which people like me who often go in to work with our parents know a lot about anyway), there are few other benefits. There is no real point in spending a week in a Supermarket if you want to be a performer.

What about people who don't know what they want to do? How do they pick a placement? They will probably also end up in a basic position. I know that all positions develop your understanding of a work place environment, but I think most if not all of the skills learnt on irrelevant work experience could be learnt on your first Saturday job. I think if they want the scheme to be effective, they need to convince more companies to give work experience placements. This wider choice would mean more people got a relevant and useful placement.

Do you know what you want to do for work experience? What do you think of the system?