Week 4: Considering work experience and voluntary work
Introduction
Last week you began to match your interests and aspirations with the employment market. Your discoveries will have been very personal to you. For instance, you might have found reassurance that it is likely to be a straightforward journey from where you are now to the work you would like to do. It is more likely, however, that you have discovered that you need to gain skills or experiences which you currently lack and have begun to think about how you could acquire these.
This week you will focus on how work experience and voluntary work can help you gain some of these skills and experiences. Even if you have a clear career path, and defined aims for what you want to achieve, you can still benefit from considering how work experience and voluntary work might help you.
Since the nature of work experience and voluntary work differ, these are treated separately this week. This may mean that parts of this week will be more relevant to you than others. You’ll start by considering work experience.
Watch Wendy introduce Week 4:

Transcript
By the end of this week, you will be able to:
- understand the benefits of both work experience and voluntary work
- explore work experience and voluntary work options to support your career development
- understand how to approach a work experience or voluntary work opportunity
- identify what you have discovered from the first half of the course.