This year, the eldest of my children reached the time in her education where she needed to get some work experience. Here in the UK, “work experience” is a formalized system whereby the young person spends a week in a working environment to give them a taste of what working life is like. Or in the words of one of my colleagues: “…to make them realise that school isn’t so bad after all…”. I assume that similar systems exist around the world, and I fully support it.
My daughter was given two months to pick a suitable location for her work experience, with much encouragement, research, and form-filling from her parents. However, it came as a surprise to literally nobody in the family that she didn’t find anywhere in time. So one Monday she came home from school with the work experience form, telling us it had to be filled in, right now. And taken back to school the next day. Her remaining option was of course to come to work with me for a week, which we duly did. Fortunately, she has been quite enjoying her geography lessons, and even more fortunately they had recently included some basic elements of geology. This, coupled with the fact that her chemistry lessons had recently been about isotopes, gave me encouragement that she could gain something from the experience.
We’re an accommodating bunch here at Isotopx, so we actually had four young people in for work experience this summer. I was involved with three of them, so had a chance to both be involved in their experiences, but also to gauge their feedback of what “work” means to a fifteen year old. Hence the subject of this blog is work experience, and why a small mass spec company may be a good choice for it.
Our company is small, yet we have to cover all of the same business processes as a large company. We even have departments and sub-departments, but all squeezed into a single medium-sized building in the town of Middlewich. For a young person who wants some work experience, this is ideal in my opinion, because they are exposed to variety.
When I consulted with my daughter, it seems that a lot of her peers went to much larger companies, typically doing one repetitive task for a whole week, or even worse, watching a family member doing that repetitive task. The trainees at Isotopx got a wealth of experience in a week, simply because we’re small enough and flexible enough to have multiple departments performing multiple tasks in a single contained location.
So my daughter spend time in the finance department, checking invoices and receipts. She also spent time with the development team, using CAD software to design a small complex shape that was then 3D printed for her. She also helped with a stock take, helped to build an instrument control PC, and did a bit of wiring on a PCB. She even sat in on a development meeting focused on next generation detector technology…. But she still has nightmares about how boring that was, so maybe I’ll skip it for the next trainee. Naturally, with a father in sales and marketing we did a bit of both of those too. She set up some new video equipment and made a “talking head” video of me wittering on about how good our customer service is. All this and she still managed to update her Snapchat account twenty four times a day. Win-win.
In some ways, this whole procedure encapsulates the differences between a small company and a large one. One advantage of a large company is that there is a sufficiency of people, meaning there is always some help when you need it. At the last large company I worked for, there was an entire IT department at my beck and call, and a fleet of expenses specialists (required to monitor my dubious expense submissions covered in an earlier blog…). Whatever I needed to complete my job, there was someone available to help me out.
Conversely, in a very small company you have to develop a degree of self-sufficiency. If you need a tool for your job, or require training in a new skill, sort it out yourself. If that sounds like I am being negative, I’m really not. It’s hard to make the initial transition if you’re used to the “big company” mentality, but you soon build up the resilience and resolution to make things happen on your own, surely a good skill to have.
Back to our work experience trainees, did they enjoy it? And just as importantly, did they learn anything? If you have or have had fifteen-year olds in your household then you probably already know the answer. At this age, young people have a lot to deal with, and trying to appear enthusiastic in a work environment full of old people (i.e. those over 17) is not high up on the list. However, they were at least there in person, and as I am a “glass half full” kind of person, I do think they’ll have taken away some positives from the week. I’ll finish the blog with some quotes directly from the mouths of our trainees:
Question to trainee 1: “Now that you’re three days into your work experience, can you tell me what you’ve learned so far?”
“Dunno”
Question to trainee 2: “You’ve had quite a few sessions with different departments, would you say that you have enjoyed your work experience?”
“It’s OK”
Question to trainee 3: “Which of your training sessions would you say you liked the most?”
“Lunch”
That’s all for now. Do please let me know if you have your own anecdotes about work experiences, particularly if they relate to mass spectrometry (unlikely as that is!). As always, send your emails direct to me at: Stephen.guilfoyle@isotopx.com. More next time!
