And did you get paid?
Mine was done about 16 years ago in HMV. I spent two weeks in the stock room helping to bring in new inventory from deliveries and place the labels on the stuff. I honestly enjoyed it, it was with 2 blokes in their late 20s/ early 30s and we listened to rock music all day. I wasnt paid though.
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I did mine at 15 in the army with the 32nd Royal Artillery at Larkhill. Absolutely loved it.
I did mine with North West Water Forestry division in the 90’s. It was bloody brilliant. I got addicted to coffee, learnt how to drive and was given a machete to shape Christmas trees. Nearly took the Boss’s dogs head off.
Went all over the north west, visited loads of places and picked the Christmas tree for the town centre. Unreal. Kids these days don’t get anything like that! I was absolutely exhausted after 2 weeks!
M&S Financial Services – the cafe was full of M&S food but at a fraction of the price.
This was then a bit awkward for the lasses on a diet I was working with when I’d spend my entire “lunch money” on about 2 packs of sandwiches, 5 desserts etc. and come back to our table with a pile of food. I wish I still had such a high metabolism.
10 or 12 years ago for me. No pay, not even a luncheon supplied. I was at a provincial solicitors firm and witnessed some serious workplace bullying in the week I was there, I had somebody shadowing me myself recently and made sure to offer him a selection of snacks and drinks whenever we were in the car going somewhere. Just seemed an obvious courtesy.
I then did some at a school where my mum taught, it was very amusing to see the kids’ terrible behaviour but for the most part I just sat doing data entry. No pay, but food was provided.
Almost twenty years ago I did my work experience at a grave yard. Was a fancy private place a family friend owned. I watched a digger dig a grave and then the owner let me drive his Land Rover Defender around his land. Looking back it was a pretty good day.
A local community theatre in 1996.
Did some office admin, a bit of lighting and sound engineering and some prop / scenery building. I was able to parlay it into a couple of weeks of paid work over the following summer getting their contact/donor list digitised.
I was definitely lucky my mum knew the boss there – plenty of my friends spent 2 weeks shrink-wrapping CDs in the back room of HMV. Pretty much everybody got shop work unless they came in to school and suggested somewhere else and aranged it themselves.
I did mine at a couple of different preschools back in the 90s it was actually good fun 1 basically just playing games and things for 2 weeks
Caretaker at my own school and no, didn’t get paid.
Only reason I did it was because I genuinely had no idea what I wanted to do after college besides “musician” or “pro wrestler” so I panicked, remembered James Hetfield from Metallica was a school caretaker in his late teens before the band became huge in 1983 and just blurted out that I wanted to do that.
This was in 2000, since people are saying the years they did it.
Did mine at the rspca. Most of the adult staff were bullies and proper rough lol. I did it with another girl from my school she was super outgoing and loud like them I was shy. So she got given jobs like walking the dogs I got told to shovel the shit out the cages. She got a glowing review I got a crap one even though I worked hard. I had literal full grown ass adults saying “erm why do you not talk” and laughing behind my back. Bout a year or so after I did it the manager got fired for putting down animals unnecessarily. Knew she was a dick.
At a pet shop. I spent my mornings cleaning out the animals’ cages and the afternoon dealing with stock. It was pretty chill and they let me go home early every day, including a half day on my final day, I also got a £25 voucher from them. The only annoying thing about it was another kid in my year did their work experience at a different pet shop round the corner and kept coming in to complain to me about how much he hated it. It was distracting and he could not understand that doing this was probably one reason why his manager was not happy with him.
Mine was at a sign writers in 2005. Making the advertising boards for a football team before they were all LED screens. I found it really interesting and went back once I finished school for a couple of months. Yes I got paid for the work experience.
Mine was 34 years ago. I spent two weeks at a computer repair place taking the plastic lids off Commodore 64 ‘datasette’ tape drives, snipping off a bit of plastic and putting the lid back on again. It was mind numbingly boring and I hated every second of it.
Early 2000’s in a video game rental shop in the small town I used to live in.
The owners came from the same county I was born in so we had a decent time reminiscing.
I had plenty of chip butties from round the corner for lunch and we got to play This Is Football on PS2 when it came in.
A few years later, they got shut down for a form of illegal trading I believe.
Nursery. Terrible bullying of each other and by managers. I spent the majority of the time cleaning and washing up. It was shit. When I was allowed a more interesting job, the tasks were unattainable given my complete lack of experience i.e manage arriving time with 20+ children. Tasks such as filling the water pool were not explained beyond ‘use your initiative’ and I’m still not sure how it should have been done as no guidance was offered. They refused to allow me to see my teacher, claiming I was ‘busy’ when she visited (which she just accepted and left!).
On the final day I witnessed a nursery nurse assault a child, as they were bitching about someone else, and didn’t like being interrupted. He asked multiple times to go the toilet until he eventually wet himself in shock when she assaulted him.
And to top it off they gave me the lowest possible score for every aspect and completely useless feedback ‘oh someone said you didn’t look confident’ hence the score.
At a vets (fuck know why). I hated it and couldn’t wait for it to end. They let me watch one of the procedures and it was a mouldy old dog having his anal glands emptied. Really changes a bloke.
Local free weekly newspaper when I was 15. It was shit, I obviously didn’t know anything much about local issues nor how to write in their style, and they weren’t inclined to teach me. Spent two weeks sorting out their files and proofreading articles, and made a lot of tea.
I was well into guitars so I did mine at Dawsons music. I nicked about 5 sets of guitar strings, loads of plectrums and never worked in retail again
I did it in Tesco and remember nothing except that the 7/7 bombings happened while I was there, not there in London to clarify.
Local trading standards office. It was OK, mostly spent the week just shadowing the officers whilst they visited various shops/factories etc. Nothing particularly exciting. Didn’t get paid for it, but through that I did get signed up to the test purchase program, where they would take a load of 16 yr olds out to try and buy alcohol underage. Got paid a few quid for that, and they bought us McDonald’s for lunch and loads of sweets throughout the day. That was usually pretty fun.
I was in year ten so 15? At a primary school as a teaching assistant. It was pretty fun because I was with a reception class. So they did really simple things like the alphabet, counting to ten, lots of arts and crafts.
Mine was about 12 years ago. My aunt works as a primary school teacher and got me a job as an assistant. I actually did my work experience there twice, first at high school and then again at college. (we weren’t supposed to go to the same workplace, but I just didn’t tell them)
The first time I worked as an assistant in the reception class. It mostly just consisted of building lego, playing with toys and reading stories. The teacher kept bringing me hot chocolate and it was a pretty chilled week. I did have to break up one playground fight though.
The second time I worked with Year 4. They were a little harder to deal with. I spent most of my time helping them with classwork or writing up their report cards, but they could be little monsters at times.
Otherwise I spent a good few hours in the teacher’s lounge making leaflets, PowerPoint presentations and other class materials. Sometimes there was a break in the work and I could read a book, play flash games etc.
I’m also reminded of an incident I’ll never live down. The class were required to learn an instrument and they chose violin. They practiced for months and went to a local violin competition. At the end of it they were given a certificate and for some reason I was in charge of keeping it safe.
On the way back I accidentally left it on the bus and it was never seen again. Explaining that one was a doozy.
Mine was in a reception class at a primary school. I really enjoyed working with the children, and the teachers were mostly kind to me but they wouldn’t let me have my lunch in the staff room. So, every day I’d go out the school gates and find a bench to sit on and eat my sandwiches. That felt a bit mean at the time. I didn’t get paid anything.
We didn’t have it but i wish we had have done it sounds like it would have been interesting and useful. I think I would have wanted to do work experience in an office.
In a pharmacy, where the manager confused me (work experience girl) with the locum pharmacist (presumably an adult with qualifications in pharmacy) they were expecting that day, and after a two minute tour of the place left me in charge.
I did exactly the same as you. I thought it was shit, I also rubbed part of my thumb away from peeling so many stickers off things.
It was a company that owned rights to World Cup and European Championship coverage and ended up being involved in a massive corruption scandal involving Sepp Blatter.
It was just after Euro ’96 and they got me to log tapes of matches, basically fill out a spreadsheet with timecodes of everything that happened. I remember they were particularly interested in logging shots of players doing things in front of pitchside hoardings that they could sell on to the advertisers.
Was just paid the cost of my travelcard. My main memory of the week was suddenly getting a random, massive nosebleed on the tube on the way home.
BAE (British Aerospace Defence Systems) at 15yo. Was pretty cool! Got to see stuff in development, super secure buildings etc. Also learnt that despite huge security measures inside to access computer systems and server rooms, all the backup tapes were stored in a portacabin outside.
Remploy, some packing warehouse that specialises in hiring disabled folk.
They did a whip around and the 4 of us got like 23 quid each and some chocolate.
At an independent music equipment shop. It was on the top floor, a big room full of synths, samplers and drum machines. Explaining all the different features to customers, made a few sales, humphing heavy boxes of the latest gear up and down stairs – no pay, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Woolwich arsenal! It was the packaging department. Sounds boring but they made packages that could e.g. hold a tank axel and survive being chucked out of a plane.
Shitty budget hairdressers. It was dead, think I lasted 3 days sitting around doing nothing before I packed it in and just stayed at home
I did mine at Asda about 25 years ago. I’m not a store manager for a retailer so I guess it worked out well.
At school (year 10) I did mine a company where I was doing data entry for a small team, I got a lunch voucher each day.
Someone from another team said see you next Monday, she was unaware I was on work experience, that would have been a story to tell, offered a job , how I would have told the school I am not coming back. as I been offered a job.
I did mine at Mitsubishi with my dad before they pulled out of the uk. Sales side was boring and slow but the lads in the garage were a right laugh
My dad’s boss said I could do mine there in the office learning admin skills and some 3D design on the computer (I was really looking forward to this as I was really into CAD at the time so would have been beneficial). A week before my school suddenly realised they hadn’t done the necessary checks, paperwork etc so I wasn’t allowed to go there and pretty much everywhere similar had already been allocated.
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I ended up in a health food shop kind of like Holland and Barratts. It was inconvenient to get to and I really didn’t like being on the till because I was so shy and used to worry about being too slow when sorting out people’s change. I liked unpackinh the stock and restocking the shelves and didn’t mind cleaning either. Half of the time they sent me to their sister shop. The woman who drove us there was always speeding, no seatbelt and often was on the phone to her boyfriend but told me I wasn’t to tell anyone.
The second shop hadn’t been vetted by the school so technically I shouldn’t have even been there.
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edit This was around 2004ish and I got a card with a £10 Argos voucher
Can’t remember how it came about, but I did mine at a local carpenter something like 40 years ago. For some reason still remember quite a bit of it, even though I now do something completely different. They trained me in a few things a first year apprentice had to do, like joints and things like that. I also made my own chess board out of different coloured woods, which I kept for many years afterwards (although it’s gone now). I also was included in the daily tea making rounds with the real apprentices, also cleaning up the workshop at the end of the day.
Quite a different world from what I was used to at home (my late parents were a banker and a teacher), taught me a lot.
Didn’t get paid, apart from for a day at the very end of it. They were short of staff at some project and asked me if I was willing to help out with some fairly simple task I could do under the oversight of the real carpenters on the job. Did that and helped them to complete the job on time. The owner insisted on paying me something for it. Probably wasn’t much, but I think it’s the gesture that counts.
I have a vague memory of some of my school mates landing some office job type placements and in a way looking down on me. Turned out several of them didn’t do much apart from some photocopying and filing, not the most fulfilling and they didn’t learn much. Turned out my placement was far more fulfilling than theirs.