Last Updated on April 28, 2024 by Karl Thompson
An increasing number of firms are offering aspiring young employees virtual work experience.
Virtual work experience involve a range online activities relevant to specific area of work which are done entirely at home on a computer.
One of the early adopter firms offering such placements is Springpod. Their main aim is to provide young people with a taste of what it’s like to work in their chosen career sectors.
Springpod partners with private sector companies and public sector bodies to offer relatively short periods of work experience. There are a wide variety of options on offer, from construction and engineering to social care and working for the British Library. Many big named firms are represented such as Amazon and Siemens.
‘Courses’ typically only last for a few hours, some have only 7 hours of content, for example. Typical content for the courses is to outline what it’s like working the sector through ‘immersive content’. This may involve videos, work-based scenarios and activities to work through and quizzes.
Springpod is targeting teenagers aged 14-18 and has positioned itself between students and employers, also partnering with schools.
It is currently funded by company sponsorship but also schools and colleges who can pay a subscription. As far as I can tell it’s free for students at the moment, but I can easily see the potential to charge them in the future.
Advantages and Disadvantages of virtual work experience
This seems like a postmodern form of vocational education. So you might like to think about which of the more general advantages and disadvantages of vocationalism apply here.
Advantages
This seems like a real win for those students who get onto these virtual courses. It seems like an efficient way to give students an insight into different careers. This would be impossible to replicate at scale through face to face work experience.
The courses are also short enough for students to be able to try several, whereas traditional work experience has only involved one placement.
It’s easier for schools and colleges to tick the work experience box. It is a lot of organising to match students with prospective employers.
However it is still an option to do face to face placements, this doesn’t have to replace those.
It is also a possible win for the firms offering these courses. If they can incorporate some kind of assessment into the process they could use this as the first stage in their recruitment process. This would probably only apply to course for older teenagers, and this later may take some years to develop.
Disadvantages
This is virtual reality. in postmodern terms it is hyper reality. I can already feel how the experiences students are going to be given aren’t anything like the actual work.
For example look at the marking around the British Library Experience…
You’re about to be whisked away into a thrilling immersive tour of all things library…
In reality working as a librarian is a mixture of sitting in front of a computer categorising things and dealing with mundane enquires from the public. OK maybe a bit more, but the point is that most jobs are going to involve stresses and strains and people you don’t get on with.
These virtual experiences don’t prepare you for that in the same way going into an actual office would.
Will virtual work experience increase inequality?
I imagine many of the truly elite firms won’t be on this platform. The kind that recruit mainly from private schools. I can’t imagine there will be an insight into medical practice or corporate law or investment banking. These will remain closed-loop, only available face to face to the children of the wealthy who already work in such positions.
Also polarisation may be likely within virtual work experience.
Some companies are going to develop top notch virtual work experiences that feed into training programmes. These will likely be competitive and to to students on course for the best GCSEs, or those who already have them. That is the richer students.
Meanwhile there will be a lot of poorer quality courses on offer that poorer students can attend that add little value to their career portfolios. But the poorer schools and colleges have managed to tick that work experience box by paying a £500 a year subscription (or however much it is) that covers 100 students rather than having to go through the pain of organising actual work experience for them!
Relevance to A-level Sociology
This is mainly relevant to the sociology of education.
This is especially relevant to postmodernism and education.
