Your first work experience: what to know before?
An educational video of peer-to-peer education. Directly hearing the voice of other young people and of employers, the youngsters watching this video become aware of challenges, obstacles, and situations they might face in their first work experience, as well as strategies to avoid or overcome them.
This Reality Check represents the effort to find an alternative and hopefully more effective way to better prepare young people to their first experience in a workplace. By hearing the experience of other peers, especially of those who encountered some difficulties during their working period, youngsters have the chance to gain awareness on obstacles they might face too, as well as to realise that the expectations they have about a workplace may be different from the reality. Moreover, from the success stories they can also get insights into strategies to cope with different issues and situations.
In this way, they should start their traineeship/work experience more consciously and, perhaps, with a new spirit of openness, adaptation, and resilience to the contexts of the working environment. After hearing their peers’ experiences, they will also realise that a work environment is a dimension composed of various elements, between which workers, machineries, spaces, rights and duties, therefore something more complex than the mere performance of tasks. Which is an idea they might have not considered and focused on before.
Peer-to-peer learning through the use of a simple and effective instruments such as videos is the basis and innovative method chosen for this Reality Check, which could become a fixed part of every school/organisation/agency’s process of career guidance and job placement.
Learning outcomes
Additional learning outcomes
- Increase awareness on the difficulties that are often part of work experiences.
- Teach strategies to overcome obstacles that might be encountered in the workplace.
Implementation
Step-by-step
This Reality Check is composed of two main phases:
- Creation of a peer-to-peer video.
- Video viewing and discussion in plenary.
In order develop the first phase (video creation), there are some precise steps to follow:
- Identify some useful examples of difficult/successful youths’ working experiences in companies;
- Verify the possibility and/or interest of the protagonists to tell their stories to others;
- Record a short video/audio file of the stories, if possible both from the youth and the company’s perspective;
- Collect all the files and start to put them together in a video (lasting between 2 and 5 minutes).
- If a youth or a company is not willing to be recorded, it is possible to write down their story and to create a cartoon character to play their part.
Next, the implementation of the second phase (video viewing and discussion) requires:
- Identify a group of young people approaching their first work experience (between 2 and 20 participants);
- Identify at least one person that can be the moderator during the video viewing and the subsequent discussion;
- Select a space (a room, a classroom, or a company room of adequate size) in which it is possible to project the video;
- Prepare an evaluation phase to be held afterwards, formally (survey) or informally.
- Set a date and invite the participants to the initiative;
- On that day, make a short introduction about the topics of the video and the purpose of the activity. Then, project the video and ask everyone to watch it carefully. At the end of the video, give participants some minute for self-reflection;
- Start a discussion with the group about the contents of the video, their impressions about it, and their personal expectations/ideas on the work experience they are about to undertake. If necessary, guide them with some open questions;
- Sum up the outcomes of the discussion and, finally, ask them to evaluate the Reality Check.
Involved professions
This Reality Check can be implemented by different kinds of actors. Indeed, the video can be created for any type of youngsters facing their first work experience, such as students in schools, youths supported by public employment agencies, or international students doing a traineeship abroad. Therefore, depending on the target group addressed, the actors involved in the video creation might be school professionals and companies, NGOs professionals and companies, PES professionals and companies, and so on.
Moreover, it is necessary to involve one professional or one trainer as a moderator for the implementation phase, which consists of viewing and discussing the video in a plenary session with the students/youngsters.
Preparation & follow-up
In the preparation phase of this Reality Check, it is necessary to identify the actors to involve: first, it is necessary to find some youths and companies with a work experience to describe to others as an example; second, at least one trainer/moderator for the video viewing and discussion phase should be found; last but not least, it is fundamental to identify a specific target group of young users who can benefit from the Reality Check. After all the actors are defined, it is then possible to proceed with the operational tasks for implementation.
Ideally, this activity implies a follow-up consisting not only in the evaluation of the initiative itself, but also of its effect over time, meaning the investigation of its usefulness and impact on the youngsters’ actual work experience afterwards. The feedback can be collected both formally (e.g. in a survey) or informally (e.g. asking opinions/comments to the participants in person).
Evaluation
There are two possible ways to evaluate this Reality Check:
- The participants receive a questionnaire of evaluation after the final discussion phase, investigating the quality of the idea, structure, duration, contents, implementation of the Reality Check and possible adjustments or new suggestions;
- The moderator conducts an informal evaluation, asking some of the participants their opinions about the initiative and possible adjustments. The moderator should write down the comments received and then collect them all in a single document.