Line Manager Name: Susanna Plummer
Job Title: Marketing Manager
Pathways Programme: Pathways to Charity and Development 2024
Organisation Summary: Working Options in Education is a UK based not-for-profit working in the space of careers and employment for young people aged 14-19 years. Our work is designed to help young people to transform their career and life outcomes by giving them information and access to all of the options for their future career pathway.
How did hosting an intern via the Professional Pathways programme benefit you and your organisation/department?
In a charity you often have to keep moving, making things happen, ensuring things are in action … just doing. The downside of this is that it can make ‘pausing’ for research and planning feel like a less important task – and those crucial functions can often be overlooked at the detriment to the output.
This programme has allowed us, along with the other programmes the University offers, to parachute in someone with a different set of experiences to independently review our activity and be honest and thorough about its effectiveness and direction.
We now have robust research that has informed well thought out plans that are carrying us through the next quarter, ensuring our activity is working as it should be.
How was your experience of hosting a Pathways intern?
Our charity is entirely remote – we try to remove overheads and keep spending as low as we can – so we offered this internship remotely. Once again, Exeter students step up and excel by being engaging and responsive without any preempting on our part.
Basically, supervision is a joy and not a task and that makes such a huge difference as the time we save with possible miscommunication is channeled into giving insights the intern wants into our sector (which we have hopefully done again this time).
Given the Professional Pathways internship is 35 hours in total, how would you recommend ensuring both you and your intern(s) gain as much as possible from the experience?
We have tended to communicate on email before the internship begins, and also to prepare a timed outline of what will be happening on each day.
What we’ve found useful is having a brief 15-30 minute call ahead of the date the internship starts, so that (hopefully) the intern feels settled, can have input into their work plan before day one kicks off, know you ahead of starting (which removes one worry of what they think we’ll be like) and also allows us to talk through what the first morning will be like (which is odd in an remote environment, as we’re aware the interns are really hyped up for that first day, and that suddenly finding themselves alone quietly in their room after that first call on day one, and expected to start cracking on, can be a very underwhelming and probably unfriendly experience).
Why would you recommend hosting an intern via Professional Pathways?
It is mutually beneficial, which is important. You get value for your organisation via the input the student brings, but you also get to help in a mentoring style capacity to guide them through your industry and way of working, which feels pretty nice to be honest.