Hello thank you for reading
I'm 16 and as part of being at school (a levels) I have to do work experience and it's supposed to be relevant to future career plans
I would like a career on the railways and was wondering if this work experience could be done on a heritage line (I can't imagine a major operating company would take me on) , would a preserved railway be willing to take me on, it's for a week during july.
I was just wondering if anyone could tell me the liklehood of a heritage railway taking on a student for work experience, I know I'll be restricted to what I can/can't do.
I can't speak with any modern experience of the heritage lines, but your question raises a number of issues for me.
The first is the length of 'experience'. Frankly, one week is next to nothing. Or perhaps better put, if I were a regular employer, including a heritage railway boss, I would never consider offering 'work experience' for periods of anything less than, say, one month to the 'general public' school kid. It smacks of being far, far more trouble - and risk - than it's worth. The student would hardly get to learn where the tea was kept in that time.
The only exceptions to this would be:
a) if I consciously wanted to mentor and develop youth as a kind of civic duty, and I therefore budgeted this time, effort and risk into my plans and
b) if a trusted acquaintance recommended someone to me as 'a good 'un' who was seriously eager to learn and had a head on their shoulders about life. And on the railway of any kind, that would mean at least some awareness of safety in a working environment.
But obviously some companies are prepared to take youth on for a week, as your school mandates this. And I would presume that some heritage railways would be open to doing this as a kind of potential 'HR recruitment' programme in any case, ie if the kid likes the experience and is a good fit, he/she may well become some sort of regular, and a valuable contributor to the operation.
It is interesting that this subject comes up as I'm an adjunct lecturer at a local university. Of the 12 in my once-per week class, there are two, maybe three excellent students who don't know how good they are. That is to say, it is not that they are so good at the specialist subject (they definitely have more to learn), but their attitudes towards work and learning are so good that I would recommend them (and have indeed just begun to do so) to a number of potential employers for possible work experience jobs in order to help them (the kids) expand their horizons.
But I have to say that even in the case of these super exceptional kids, I wouldn't advise anything less than a month as a period for any meaningful learning 'on the job' somewhere.