Invisible Brand

Lucian Camp considers the life-sapping implications of providing work experience today for the business leaders of tomorrow

SOMETIMES, TIME PASSES AGONISINGLY SLOWLY. Like when you’re waiting for traffic lights to change and you’re in a hurry. Or the three minutes of stoppage time when your team’s pinned back in the penalty area and desperately hanging on to a 1-0 lead. Or research debriefs. But I’d suggest that in agency life, the slowest that time ever passes is when it’s your responsibility to entertain, inform and involve a kid who’s come in on work experience.

Don’t get me wrong. I fully accept that being willing to provide work experience is one of the very few absolute moral imperatives in the agency world – especially when the candidates in question are the offspring of important clients. But the fact that it’s right doesn’t make it easy. And what makes it really hard is that, instead of leaving it till the later stages of the sixth form, they now punt the kids out for work experience much earlier, usually in the year before GCSEs. Now, at this age, frankly, they’re like children. Well, actually they are children. And introducing them to the world of work in any meaningful way is quite a challenge.

The Creative lure
It’s a challenge that usually lands largely in the laps of the people on the creative side of the agency, because that’s what most of the students say they’re interested in. I’m not sure quite why this is. It may simply be because they are in fact interested in the creative side of the business. Or it may be because they think this side of the business is all there is. But most likely, I suspect it’s because they anticipate they’ll be able to enjoy a week of largely-unsupervised pratting about on an Apple Mac, retouching pictures of their girlfriends and boyfriends in Photoshop and being able to download anything they like from the Internet without the Parental Controls being frustratingly set to ‘Teen’.

If I’m right that this is very largely the motivation, then I’m pleased to say that the agency more or less delivers. A week of largely-unsupervised pratting about on an Apple Mac is pretty much what they get.
 This may sound like something of a dereliction of duty on the agency’s part, but, honestly, it’s not for want of trying. In principle, we all intend to deliver a rich, diverse, involving, stimulating, multi-faceted work-experience experience. But there are two terrible problems.

First – which is where I came in – a working day is really, really long. People wanting to come in for work experience always say they’ll be delighted to make the tea or whatever. How long do you think making the tea takes? They’ve made the tea, and it’s four minutes past nine.

Now what? Second, especially with these new 14- and 15-year old work-experiencers, they simply don’t have the slightest understanding of the business environment that would enable them to make any real sense of what’s going on, no matter how carefully or thoroughly you try to explain it to them.

Innocence of youth…
In some ways, of course, this means that they still possess a refreshing innocence that can be quite a useful counterbalance to some of our sillier and more pompous affectations. For example, if you brief them to come up with some ideas for an advertising campaign, or a visual identity, they’ll come back with a few scribbles in about 45 minutes. That’s what you do at school: you solve the problems you’re set within the length of a single lesson period, or homework time. The fact that a designer could take three months to come up with a visual identity idea is ludicrous to them. They’re probably right to think this way. 45 minutes is a more reasonable amount of time than three months. But the bottom line is, they’ve shot their bolt on the brief you’ve given them, and it’s still not even 10am. Now what? Well, you can try taking them to some meetings.

At the end of the day (and at the beginning, and in the middle) if you have a white collar job, going to meetings is basically what you do. The trouble is that while those of us with a few miles on the clock can easily understand and distinguish between all sorts of meetings – routine status meetings, high-stakes new business pitch, interesting strategic discussion, uninteresting strategic discussion, etc etc etc – to the work-experience kids they all just seem like groups of old people talking meaningless rubbish. Attending half-adozen different agency meetings is about as meaningful an experience to them as being parachuted into half-a-dozen different Kafenions in remote Greek villages would be to me. All I see is very similar-looking groups of rather scary old guys playing some kind of dominoes.

So we’ve made tea, we’ve answered a brief, we’ve been to a couple of boring meetings and it’s now 11.30. On Monday morning. We make some more tea. 11.34.

Getting groovy
The situation may not be completely hopeless. At some point during the week, there may be stuff going on outside the agency in the area of creative execution which is actually quite interesting and vaguely meaningful. We can’t really place photo shoots or even commercials shoots in this category. These are interesting for a while, especially if they involve going to groovy lofts in Clerkenwell with decent sound systems, but again the fundamental problem is that it all takes far, far too long. Two days to take a photograph of a credit card? For goodness sake.

The real winner is voice-over recordings. These get ticks in quite a lot of boxes. Ride in a taxi to Soho. Studio is quite a cool place with some not-too-old people in it. With any luck, it may be next door to MTV. Unlimited free biscuits and maybe Mars Fun-Size. Some old bloke comes in who you’re told is very famous and used to be in The Singing Detective, whatever that is. He gets amusingly arsy when he’s told to read the script for the 38th time. And – crucially – it’s all over in an hour just when it was starting to get boring. Taxi back to the agency. Quite cool. Liked that. Trouble is, it’s still only 3.35. And still only Monday. Well, Sophie/Jemima/Darren/Kayleigh/Rufus, there’s a spare Mac over there – perhaps you’d like to see what you can achieve in Photoshop for a while. Or we do have a high-speed internet connection – if there’s anything you want to download, you can burn it onto CD before you go home…