Work Experience – Faux pas (or #fail)
Asking an employer for work experience? This is a mighty scary thing to do (and a spoon of concrete might help) however, there is a teensy-weensy thing you need to avoid saying if you want to keep the employer interested in offering you a placement—never, ever in a quintillion years, utter these blame-ified words:
“I have to do work experience because my school told me to”.
You may as well smack the employer around their ears, because they are hearing you say this:
“I am not interested in you, or your business, I don’t really want to be here…. I blame my school for making me do this”.
Do you think they want to waste their time and energy giving you a placement, when you clearly don’t want to be there? Hells—not likely!
Yes, many schools DO force students to undertake work experience (shock-horror!). Many students aren’t READY or even KNOW what they want to do for their placement—which can make the REASON for doing a placement seem impossible to explain to the employer.
Rather than ‘blame’ the school for your predicament, you need to decide what it is you want out of work experience.
Here are two (blameless) sentences you could try.
“This is my first time in the workforce, so I am not sure what to expect, but I am keen to give it a go”.
“I hope that doing work experience with you, will give me an idea about whether this is the right career for me... or not”.
