Benefits of Offering Work Experience

Understanding the Benefits of Offering Work Experience

The benefits of offering work experience go far beyond meeting Gatsby Benchmarks—they provide meaningful, real-world learning for young people and valuable insights for employers. Encounters with employers and experiences of the workplace are powerful learning experiences for young people.

One of the key benefits of offering work experience is helping young people develop essential workplace skills while giving employers a chance to connect with future talent. Workplace experiences have evolved over the years, where progressive, high quality programmes achieve impact through tailored initiatives, starting with engagement from Year 7 and identifying clear intent to structuring and adapting programmes to modern working practices. When young people and employers work together with purpose there are benefits to both:

Young people gain insight into the world of work – including the skills required. This helps them make future career decisions and builds motivation in the here and now.
Employers learn about their future workforce (and even begin the recruitment process).
Disadvantaged young people – who have fewer connections and social networks disproportionately benefit from high quality interactions with employers.
Best practice includes planning learning objectives (including skills young people are working on) in advance, using the experience as ‘real life assessment’ and building the experiences into the wider career-ready curriculum.