Hosting Work Experience Students – should we, or shouldn’t we?

My colleague Ellie, wrote a fantastic blog, ‘Young volunteers – breaking down barriers,’ to share why, we at CCVS, would like to see more young people volunteering, and what needs to happen to support that change.

With this in mind, when we received an email from a student at Netherhall School last year, saying they would like to do their work experience at CCVS, we felt this was something we should do, as we know work experience can be a route into volunteering, as well as potentially a career in the sector.

That’s not to say it was a straightforward decision, like most small charities, we juggle many projects and priorities and knew that preparing for and supporting a Year 10 student for a week, would take time.

Nevertheless, after conversations with our team, about how and why we should give this a go, we met with the student and made the commitment.

Within this blog I’ll talk about how we planned the students time and what we learnt from the experience, as it may help your charity consider its options, when receiving a similar request.

Share the load and collate ideas 

Whilst we knew that someone would need to lead on planning and supporting the student, Ryan, we also knew that our team is our strength.

The team at CCVS are fantastic, like many charities, we have people with a brilliant passion for what they do, along with a range of experience and skills. So to plan Ryan’s time, we chatted as a team at team meetings for ideas of tasks we could provide, to give someone who knew little about our charity, an understanding of our work and the wider sector. We also created a shared document to note down ideas, and follow-up conversations, based on what we had pulled together.

I collated these ideas and added them to a timetable for the week, taking team members availability into account, so we could see how long each task could take, and mapped out who could support Ryan with the different elements.

This meant that, whilst I oversaw Ryan’s placement, other members of the team were working with him on tasks that related to their roles, adding variety to his experience with us.

Include ‘getting to know you’ time 

We were very aware that coming into an office, as a Year 10 student, to support the work of people you don’t know, is a nerve-racking experience.

With this in mind we made sure to listen to Ryan, to learn about his interests and see how they aligned with our work.

For example, Ryan is creative, one of his favourite subjects included design, and he had enjoyed using Canva for a school project.

This helped us tailor and focus on providing tasks to support our communications team, including creating graphics for our social media platforms.

This resulted in some brilliant work, that we were lucky to be able to share.

We made sure to schedule time for Ryan to talk to different members of the team, either in-person, or online, to hear more about their role and background.

Whilst this might not always be seen as part of a work experience placement, we were keen to showcase what it is like to work within a charity, and to do this, we wanted to give the opportunity to learn about the different roles in our organisation.

Make sure you have extra tasks up your sleeve 

I had been given a tip beforehand, to keep in mind that we might run out of things for Ryan to do, beyond what had been preplanned.

With this in mind we made sure to keep talking to Ryan, having little check-ins at the start and end of each day, to find out how he had found it, along with generally talking along the way.

This helped us understand what he enjoyed and when he was getting through things faster than expected, giving us time to call on colleagues and arrange more tasks for him to get stuck into.

It takes time but there are lots of benefits  

Whilst hosting a work experience student does take time to prepare, it was really rewarding to see someone develop confidence and understanding of the voluntary sector, in such a short time frame, whilst also sharing their skills and interests with us.

Ultimately, we know that the voluntary sector can struggle with recruitment (State of the Sector Report, 2024) and we hope that by being open to hosting work experience students, we can help, in a small way, to tackle this issue. Whilst also being lucky enough to meet and learn from interesting people along the way!

Ryan wrote a short blog about his placement at CCVS.