Why is work experience important? And how has it helped me?

I’m sure many of you have heard about the importance of work experience, internships and placements before but I wanted to explain from a personal point of view how important finding work experience was for me. I know a lot of people joke around about people on work experience do tedious tasks such as getting coffee, photocopying and filing, but all the places I’ve been the people have been really good at giving me interesting and informative tasks so you should definitely try and get some experience. The possible benefits are:

1. Experience makes you more employable compared to others with similar grades and extracurricular activities.
2. Gives you an insight in what working in a particular field is like before committing to a lifelong career. Can also show you what you’re interested in and passionate about for when you do go for a job.
3. There’s a lot of things you can’t learn in a classroom or lecture theatre and work experience allows you to immerse yourself into a new learning environment.
4. It shows passion and interest – employers will know that you are genuinely interested.
5. Allows you to hone your people skills within an office (or maybe studio or factory or just outside depending on what you want to do) environment.
6. You can identify strengths and weaknesses of your own skills which you can then work on before you get a full time job.
7. Networking is an important part of any career – it can often be who you know not what you know.
8. You may get a job at the end of it if they like you.
9. Can bulk up your CV if it’s looking a bit empty as you’re looking for your first job.

I would say the first point is a really important for me as a motivator to gain experience; so I did work shadowing twice and had work experience at two different places in order to be competitive when I apply for a placement during my third year of university. Both of my work shadowing gave me insight into what I would not want to do as I spent time at a local bank branch and then a food production factory office. Personal banking and food production planning were just not for me.

My work experience places were much more positive experiences as I found that I really enjoyed digital marketing – in particular affiliate marketing and social media management. This is really helpful to know as I can choose modules during my course around these interests and also apply for placements which are about digital marketing rather than anything else. I would also say it really helped to create contacts with digital marketers in my area and so I got to learn from some great people and often I learnt things that I wouldn’t really pick up in lectures or seminars.  For example I got to enhance soft skills such as commercial awareness, communication and team working.

While on work experience I could also deduct that some skills weren’t my best such as my written communication so I’ve started to work on that. There were also skills which I found I was good at and I got a lot more confident in myself because of this which helped when I was in lectures or doing assignments.

Overall I absolutely think that doing work experience has helped me with my self-confidence, my industry skills and also creating a network on LinkedIn which will help in the future. It’s something important to do to really make your CV or even your UCAS application stand out and to help develop yourself personally.

If you have any questions about the benefits you can ask in the comments, I’ll be happy to answer the best I can!