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Work Experience
All of our students on full-time study programmes must complete a minimum of 35 hours work experience, relating to one or more units of their course. This helps them to gain valuable experience, build essential skills, and to make informed decisions about their future careers.
Why provide work experience?
As an employer, not only are you helping to bridge the grap between education and employment, there are also a number of benefits for you as well.
Closing the Skills Gap
Research from Skills England, part of the Department for Work and Pensions, has identified a clear gap between future demand for labour across key sectors, and the work-readiness of young people.
With an expected 24% growth in pirority sectors over the next decade, creating more than 1.8million new jobs, it’s vital that we ensure our learners are developing the employability skills that businesses like yours need to stay competitive (Skills England).
By providing work experience, you’re ensuring that our learners have the opportunity to learn those skills on-the-job, in a realistic workplace setting.
Removing Barriers to Entry
The current job market is extermely competitive, for young people. Of more 17,500 jobs analysed from LinkedIn’s job boards in 2024, 37% of ‘entry-level’ roles required prior experience (Business Insider).
Prospects for 25-34 year olds are not much better, with 74% citing ‘lack of experience’ as the reason for rejection from entry-level roles (Virgin Media O2).
By providing work experience for our learners, you’re helping them to build up their CV, improving their chances when they get that first interview, and increasing their confidence to pursue meaningful employment.
Reaching Potential Recruits Earlier in Their Career Journey
Recruitment can come with considerable time and monetary costs for any business. Through offering work experience, you can effectively reach the next generation of talent earlier in their career journey.
This not only means that you have access to future talent, before any other business, but also that you can forgo the costs of having to search for it in the first place.
Employer-set projects, or work experience has enabled many of our young people to discover opportunities in local businesses, within industries they may have never considered before. Some of our partners consistently offer long-term positions to standout performers within the projects that they set. This also reinforces the value of these projects and briefs for our learners.
Extended Interviews in the Workplace
In addition to the cost-savings, work experience can enable your business to conduct an ‘extended interview’ of a potential employee, ensuring that you can more accurately evaluate whether they would be a good fit for your businesses as opposed to a traditional hiring process.
You can get a much better feel for someone’s character and aptitude for a role over a number of weeks, rather than a few hours.
Developing Desired Skillsets
Through work experience, your business can directly contribute to the development of skills within the future labour market, whilst ensuring that the skills developed are in alignment with the specific demands of your industry.
As an education and training provider, we work with businesses and governing bodies to ensure that we are training learners with the skills that local businesses tell us they need, but every business is different, and therefore, tailored, targeted training is most effective for developing your future workfoce.
Get in touch with our Employer team today.
Call – 01992 411572
Email – employers@hrc.ac.uk
Or you can fill out the form below:
Looking for talent?
If you’re looking for new talent, you’re in the right place.
Whether it’s an apprenticeship, work placement, work experience or volunteering, businesses and employers like you play a crucial role in enhancing the skills and knowledge of learners by providing opportunities for them to apply what they’ve learnt in the workplace.