Working with Colleges & Schools

I had a great meeting with Joanna, the Principle of Stockton VIth Form College, this week. We arranged it based upon a brief conversation we had at an event where I was very impressed by their plan to provide students with work experience,

We have had a few students for work experience in the past with mixed success, largely dependent upon the organisation involved. It went really well with both MacMillan College and Kings Academy but badly with Redcar College. Last summer we had a Summer Intern from Teesside Uni who was brilliant, we've had 2 French students for a while via the Uni, one was great, one wasn't and we now have Michael for almost a year as an Intern and who we plan to have as the next employee if he wants it - he's that good.

Therefore, I'm very keen to work with educational establishments to provide opportunities and experience but as a micro business it can cause problems. The reality is that a school work experience person probably ties up a member of staff for a full 5 days, a college one for  around 3 days and a uni one from the right academic background around a day tops. That is work not paying its way and significant for my business

A typical school or college work experience is for a full week and we simply cannot do that regularly as we are too busy to leave a staff member as unproductive for a week.

The solution, and a really great one from Stockton VIth Form, is to have work placements every Friday of term. That means devoting around 0.5 days of staff time per week and is manageable. The reality may be that over a year that is more staff time than we currently commit but the issue for us is more about devoting a big block in one go than spending the time which we see as valuable for us, the college and the student.

The net result is we are happy to have 1 student, either in half-term or term blocks, throughout the year. We win as we get the chance to work with some great young people and potentially cherry pick some future employees, the college gets to sell the fact that its computing, graphics and English students get the chance to work on commercial projects and have real experience, and the student gets to put that on their CV (and may even get a job out of it longer term). Win, win, win!

There is also the feel good factor we get from simply contributing. You can't ignore how much better you do as a business and personally by contributing and feeling good about what you do. Guess who is reading The Happiness Advantage at the moment!

More than that, after a good chat and meeting some key staff, we will be looking to help out by providing commercial graphics projects for students to supply "real-life" projects with payments for work used and I'm also going to be one of the businesses involved in their local board for delivering their STEM specialism.

Very happy and very excited about building this relationship and a very refreshing attitude from a  forward thinking college.