Why we provide work experience and an example week with us.
For many years now we have been part of the local schools drive to find quality placements for work experience, which is a mandatory part of the schools responsibility as part of their careers guidance responsibilities. For our work with local schools and colleges we have been recognised as Industry Champions and find welcoming students into our work environment very worth while and enjoyable. It challenges us as much as it does them!
For work experience placements, we try and provide a flexible approach to what students can learn from being with us, with the first discussions around ‘what the student current does’ and ‘what the student thinks they want to do’ as their career. The aim is to give the student as much real world experience in an area of our business that they are interested in so they get a reasonable understanding of what it is like to work in a business such as ours and also have some guidance on how to progress personally in the area of their choice away from school.
Additionally, we also try and give them some work that we need done (maybe some research, or adding content to a website) and where possible we let them sit in on both internal meetings and client visits.
Recently we welcomed Josh from Willingdon Community College who expressed both an interest (and some experience) in writing code, so James (who started with us as an apprentice developer in Summer 2017) designed a few little projects for him for his week with us. The projects were:
- A JavaScript clock
- A flex box panel
- A JavaScript drum kit
- Days alive calculator
The mini-projects were designed to be reasonably simple to start with and more challenging and complex to end with and each task designed so it could be published.
Josh smashed the first task in his first morning, we had thought it would take him a day or so, so we skipped 2 and 3 and went on to the harder ‘how many days alive’ calculator.
Here is Josh’s take on his time with us:
"My week at BarkWeb:
"I have spent a week at Barkweb, in order to learn what the day to day job of a programmer would look like. I have done many things to help my understanding of what a workplace might be like including attending meetings and shadowing one of the developers here. Throughout the week I have been set various tasks which meant I had to learn a new programming language in order to complete them. These tasks were coding a working clock and a days alive calculator. While these were very difficult I was able to learn from my mistakes and improve thanks to the assistance of James.
"This week has been hugely beneficial and enjoyable for me and I have learnt a large amount . I will continue to learn using the resources I was given before I finished my time at BarkWeb."
Josh's days alive calculator
What was so good about having Josh with us is that we managed to complete a real and valid task and publish the code within Jolojo.
Summary
The week Josh was with us was a bank Holiday week, so we only had 4 days with him. He worked from 10:00 to 16:00 (this is a much better time frame for work experience students in our experience, a full day can be a bit too much for students to be engaged and productive). Only 24 hours in total!
In such a small time he demonstrated that he was keen to learn, learnt quickly and was able to apply what he learnt to the projects we gave him. As a bonus Josh also managed to fit in some research for a new market we are engaging with, so he added real value to time with us.
In summary, a really enjoyable week for us and I am sure that the learning and experience that Josh gained will be of real benefit to some of the choices he will be making over the next few years. Who knows, he may even come to work for us one day….