Work Experience Week: A young person's and employer's experience
17 October 2014
Friday 17 October
Agit Akay: "My work experience has had a major impact on my attitude"
Work experience plays an important part in our Talent Match London employability programme, and supports a young person to gain practical experience in a work environment, as well as learning more about the career they will want to pursue. F. Glennie-Smith, a young person involved on the programme through the Collage Arts partnership, has conducted the interview below with a work experience partnership, the young person and the employer.Their findings are shared with you below:
G-S- Glennie Smith (Young person from the Collage Arts Partnership)
A.A- Agit Akay (Talent Match London participant undertaking work experience)
G-S: “The date is the 9th of October, 2014 and I have interviewed one Agit Akay about his time as a young person doing work experience with Amina Khayyam Dance Co. through Talent Match London.”
G-S: How long have you been with Talent Match, and what is your opinion of them?
A.A: I have been with Talent Match for approximately 3 months. My opinion is that it has great potential to change so many young people’s lives. It has the ability to save young people from a lot of problems and anxiety.
G-S: How soon after joining Talent Match were they able to find work experience for you, and was it a good match for you?
A.A: I was given a lot of help to find work experience, after receiving a few emails from Toby, I applied and managed to get work experience in various areas. I volunteered for Talent Match job fair and other activities.
G-S: Has your work experience yielded any good results?
A.A: The work experience I received has had a major impact on my work attitude. With the help from Talent Match as well as work experience, I now have concrete goals that I want to achieve. A clear vision of where I want to be.
G-S: Any feedback? Anything you would change, or any advice you’d like to give the staff at Talent Match?
A.A: What would help is to keep helping. Offering more weekly sessions and activities, workshops would help young people come out of their comfort zone. So more regular activities and perhaps a stronger/closer connection/relationship with the young people would help with all kinds of problems. Which can be difficult for Talent Match but very essential.
G-S: Has working with Talent Match been a positive experience for you?
A.A: Working with Talent Match has been very positive in my experience. I believe things like Talent Match are very much needed for us young people. Especially if a young person is unsure about the future or has low self-confidence/self-esteem.
A core component of the Talent Match London programme is employer engagement, so this interview would not be complete without the perspective of the employer who offered the work experience opportunity below:
G-S: A colleague (Mel) and I also interviewed his employer, Olwen, and she was very welcoming. She spoke about Agit, and had a lot of praise for him.
Olwen: “Agit was a really intelligent, very, very resourceful young man and I was really impressed. I didn’t have to explain tasks more than once, that really helped me, he just got on with the tasks, he was quite dynamic so he was very able to find a solution to a problem I might give him. So for example, the most important piece of work that he did for me, which was really helpful, and he did it really quickly was as a dance company we’ve got an autumn tour coming up, we’ve got three UK tour dates and I particularly wanted to focus on marketing on one particular area because the venue wasn’t able to offer us much marketing so he was helping me with that. What I wanted to do was contact local organizations who could put up a poster or some flyers, and so promote to events to local people and that was pretty much all the instruction I needed to give him.”
G-S: She spoke of the flexibility they were able to implement in regards to Agit’s schedule during his first week, and of how they resolved problems through Talent Match London. She appreciated what Talent Match London was doing for young people in North London, as she reflected that when she was a young person, finding a job wasn’t as hard for her then as it is for us now.
Click here for more information about Talent Match London.
