In June of Year 12, Shiplake pupils undergo a compulsory week of work experience. Gaining familiarity with professional workplaces is invaluable for UCAS applications and of course an important part of building an impressive CV. Four months on, we caught up with some Year 13 pupils who have recognised the importance and value of their experiences.
‘Watching a draft meeting at Seven Seconds Advertising Agency convinced me of the value of preparing for a meeting with clients. Some of the agency staff played the parts of visiting clients and asked some very difficult questions,’ said Tommy Moore as he looked back on his week’s work experience in June 2014. ‘I was asked to prepare a pitch to British Airways on their short-haul flights product. Although it was a challenging task, it has boosted my confidence and I now look forward to approaching job interviews with a similarly professional approach.’
Business students, in their final year, are currently analysing the effectiveness of information and channels of communication used by the companies they visited during their work experience or at other times.
‘TMX is a thriving company with a growing market potential,’ said Jack Sherman. ‘They hire out railway rolling stock but currently their policy over client cancellations is losing sales. Clients can cancel at very short notice and then TMX are not able to hire out the equipment resulting in lost revenue.’
Jamie Lewis analysed his time at the Commonwealth Games selling merchandise. ‘Although the company initially under-estimated demand that shouldn’t have been a problem as there was plenty more stock in the warehouse, which wasn’t too far away. The problem was that it was difficult to get in touch with the warehouse managers to get them to run extra deliveries. They missed a lot of sale opportunities.’
The insight gained into the commercial world through valuable work experience placements such as these will give Business students a real boost as they search for higher education courses and jobs in the future. Next, the pupils will put their hands-on experience to good use as they evaluate how their chosen company has made two strategic decisions such as introducing a new product, creating a new staff position in the hierarchy or expanded a particular area of the business.
Continuing with the information theme they will be assessing the reliability and value of sources of data such as background economic data provided by the government and marketing data available from commercial market research organisations. Then they must assess the potential value of internal data such as profit and loss accounts, balance sheets, previous expenditure on staffing and staff opinion audits. A busy term in Business!
