Now that I've seen an active thread about Southern in the recruitment section, I might as well chime in here rather than making a whole thread about the following!
My college will be releasing me for work experience in March, and I am going to apply at Southern for work experience. I have been given the contact details of the Project Office Manager at GTR as apparently she's in charge of work experience.
What kind of work experience do Southern offer? Do they put you on a set task or on different tasks such as train dispatching?
Just want to know what happens before I send off my application.
I understand with your years of railway experience and insightful commentary on operational issues you'll be seconded to following around the passenger services director, cleaning up whoopsies and other such important tasks.
By which I mean, no, you won't be train dispatching as that's safety critical and despite you knowing all about it I'm afraid they can't let you do it. I'm going to be moderately helpful and say you'll probably visit different areas of the business to see what they do and help out in little ways like providing passenger information on stations, doing a bit of cleaning and tidying, seeing how rostering offices work, maybe doing a bit of something like announcing, visiting a depot, seeing how HR etc work. I suggest you stay well away from any conductors though as some of them read this forum.
They might do the other format of work experience which is less varied but probably more realistic and stick you on a station for your placement and you'll help out in any way possible, IE none safety critical tasks. Bit of time in the ticket office, some on the platform, with the station supervisor etc.
