Coding, Not Coffee, on Work Experience??
Coffee, drudge work, photocopying these are things that normally spring to mind about work experience. However, KPMG offered something a bit more to 25 year 10 girls on their flagship It’s Her Future programme.
This initiative lead by a bunch of grads in KPMG’s Technology Consulting department took these girls from all around London for a week of work experience.
Now, it’s hardly unheard of for big companies (particularly Big 4 firms) to offer work experience — be it an unpaid week to pre-GCSE kids or more substantial internships and placement years to students (including me!). But how much value can a week in such a firm really be to a teenager? Well, apparently a lot if you put the effort in.
For the 5 days, the lucky girls were treated to their own curriculum (read more on their blog). This included women from Amazon talking about drones, Nigel Slater (the head of Tech Consulting in the UK) stopping by to say hi and a coding day lead by us.
We created a bespoke day tailored to teens that covered awesome women in tech (inspiration is always needed), logic thinking (my favourite thing to teach anyone), design, HTML + CSS and idea generation. This involved a mix of activities both offline (paper, pen and old-school talking), activities taken from Hour of Code and learning code using CodePen. It’s important to ensure the girls realise that a lot of tech work is thinking, planning and discussing (sometimes the best bits).
We loved being involved with such a fab initiative. If these girls are the future, we’re in very safe hands. Actually, we were a bit jealous there was nothing like this when we were 14.
There’s more to work experience than making coffee, but it requires the magic ingredient — humans!
Love, Laura (from tbh)
If you want to find out more about KPMG It’s Her Future programme — here you go.
If you want to work with us to take your work experience offering to the next level — please contact us — humans@taughtbyhumans.com
