‘Bring your child to work day’ is far more nerve-racking for the parent

Whatever your life’s work is, do it well.” So said Martin Luther King Jr, to whom the comment would justly apply.

But what about a work experience placement? Try your best, for sure, but more importantly don’t get conned into calling the local zoo and asking for “Mr G Raff”. That was the fate that befell one of my school friends during a challenging two weeks at a firm of local solicitors. A cruel trick to play on a 14-year-old, but not unfunny.

For children, work experience is sold as a way to gain insights into careers you might like to take up – or at least into the real, grown-up world. “It’ll look good on your Ucas form,” or so we were told 30 years ago.

It certainly has its merits. For anyone set on a particular pathway, work experience can be invaluable – although a young person’s keenness is still too easily exploited by bosses looking for cheap (or free) labour. That on its own is an argument against anything but the shortest of placements unless there is a proper wage on offer.

Still, there can also be value in doing things you have no intention of pursuing for real. I wound up working at a country park for two weeks during my fourth year at secondary school and it was a truly joyful fortnight. I drove tractors, laid hedges, scythed hay and generally had a lovely time, without ever once thinking that I might one day become a park ranger – though I sometimes think wistfully about what could have been.

Later, during my A-levels and while at university, I did further placements at the Imperial War Museum and at Spink & Son auctioneers. I can’t recall how either came about, nor what I hoped to get out of them. On the face of it, they were probably the kind of places I thought I might actually want to work at; neither was as fulfilling as planting bluebells or rounding up sheep.

Life, as it so often does, has now come full circle, as this week my daughter accompanied me to the office for an “insight day”: a terrifying prospect for both of us.

Ahead of her visit, I told her to check out our website, which she did for about a minute and a half. I fretted that I should have prepared her better; then I worried that she might tell my colleagues about how I sometimes absent-mindedly pick my nose in front of the telly.

It was not, said the school’s explanatory notes, intended that pupils should necessarily do any work, but rather should shadow their parent, family friend or acquaintance of a well-connected aunt. For my daughter, I feared that this might amount to watching me send a gazillion emails, sitting in on a couple of Zoom meetings and hearing me mutter regular swear words under my breath. Thankfully, my colleagues agreed to step in and help.

On the appointed day, we arrived bright and early, my daughter having dressed smartly for the occasion in a tweed jacket that had last been worn during a production of Bugsy Malone. I made introductions, trying not to let on that I was as nervous about it as she was. She joined several meetings, interviewed three of my co-workers and wrote a list of the skills she had witnessed, which was gratifyingly long. She also tested a survey on a Google form using the name Insipida Dilute. I didn’t know what to make of that.

By the end of the day, she had given a thoroughly good impression and seemed to have enjoyed herself. But school might not seem like quite such a drag after a day in an office.

Teenage work experience is not the be all and end all, and is perfectly likely to have no bearing on a person’s future career. But it can inspire a lifelong passion to do life’s work well – even if that work turns out to be at a zoo rather than in a lawyer’s office.