Providing a good Work Experience

[Tim Barlow]

We have a school pupil joining us for a week. I am keen that it should not be the making tea and photocopying type of work experience that I endured.

Any ideas to help make it a worthwhile week appreciated.

 

[Power Lunch Club]

As long as it not to personal....allow them to help with credit control. And show them the impact THEY can have, when controlling the cash coming into the business (or even what happen, when they don't).

We did this for several school pupils that attended and they all said the same thing. That it taught them a valuable lesson in being part of of a business and how their role helped and made them feel part of the bigger picture of a company.

If its general work experiance, get them typing letters, franking post, opening and date stamping mail, getting it out to all it's allocated too.

The only thing I wouldn't recommend is giving them some sales tasks, even on the phone, they don't have experiance or confidence of you business to sell it and your potential clients could smell this and it could tarnish you repuations (that's not a reflection of the indiviual).

 

[Brian McIntosh]

How about running them through the whole shebang of setting up an adwords account with your company? From the initial phone call with a client, researching exactly what they need, pricing things up, making up invoices, actually placing the ads on Google, follow up calls to clients to ask if they are happy or not, tracking results, etc. As Gordon says, I wouldn't let them anywhere near a client but if they have a good grasp of the whole process and the work that needs to be done you could let them loose on making up paperwork and maybe research some campaigns. Oh, and a bit of photocopying didn't hurt anyone.:thumbup1:

 

[polr]

We have a few uni students coming into ours in the next few weeks, we have found writing a proper job description has really helped to get our heads together and to give them a clear idea of what they were expected to do. In terms of what they are doing, we are giving them control of a site to market (with all steps to be ok'd by management first of course!) and letting them sit in on a few meetings.

Oh, and believe me...in our office, it doesn't matter what you do, you HAVE to take your fair share of coffee making ;-)

 

[Tim Barlow]

Ideas so far:

• credit control (thanks Gordon)
• client reporting
• coming along to a seminar (hopefully courtesy of Events for Business)
• attending a sales meeting (any volunteers :001_rolleyes
• presenting to us on "how 14 year olds use the internet" - always insightful)
• mystery shopping client websites
• adding a post to our blog
• getting him to call Google and see how many times they try to sell the content network to him :huh:
• keyword research
• fair share of coffee making! (Don't have a photocopier unfortunately)

Please keep them coming!

 

[peteark]

Get him ready for life after school, introduce him to the kettle and brew making kit

 

[Tim Barlow]

Pete, are you trouble making?

 

[peteark]

Just my humour

 

[Tim Barlow]

Thanks everyone for your input. I think he has had a good wekk with us.

You might be interested in his views on the Internet.