Work Experience

In my day, you were lucky to get anything remotely related to your ideal career choice for your early High School Work Experience placement. The teacher that arranged mine was proud to tell me she'd got me "something with computers"... I can only assume that she phoned around local businesses asking "do you use computers?" because my placement, far from being anything to do with the creation of videogames, was in a business who made and supplied pumps of all shapes and sizes, and for all purposes. One of their pumps, they gleefully stated, could pump baked beans.

My later Work Experience placements were arranged with a little bit more input from me, and by a teacher who was much more clued up. I got myself one afternoon a week for several months at a videogame developer in Hackney and they, in turn, got me a 2 week placement at their publisher. I still wasn't doing anything massively important or interesting, or even getting a particularly good idea of how a software publishing in the mid-90s worked... and, frankly, they'd run out of things for me to do by the end of the first week... but at least it was the right field.

These days, however, it seems to be much better. This week, we had two Work Experiencers in Production. One the friend of the daughter of one of our Sales Managers, the other the son of a friend of our ex-MD's wife. And rather than having them do the filing for Copy Controllers, or making tea every five minutes, my boss gave them projects. One only did a single advertisement for herself, the other did a whole slew of advertising concepts - including mocked-up shots of the ads in situ, on buses, bus stops and massive hoardings - for one of my employers non-publishing ventures.

I must confess, my blood ran cold when my boss asked me to assess his work. Naturally I expected the worst - I've had more than 15 years of working with allegedly experienced, supposedly professional Designers who were crap... what on Earth would a teenager with little DTP experience produce? He'd used Photoshop and Flash, but not Quark, or even InDesign.

And yet, with a little tutoring from one of our best designers, he managed to produce three ad campaigns which perfectly fitted his brief... and his artworking wasn't half bad, either. Accuracy and alignment were a little off, but generally excellent for someone with no previous Quark experience.

In fact, we were all so impressed with his stuff, that my boss is thinking of (a) using it, and (b) sending this mere teenager's work to Head Office, as an example of what a good advertising campaign looks like. The one they recently sent out was shocking - not even good enough for a parish magazine, as far as I was concerned, let alone our hallowed pages.

I certainly think it'd be cool to use them - the boy took away with him a CD containing all the work he'd done during the week along with glossy printouts to show his teachers, but how brilliant would it be to publish one of his ads, and send him the magazine?

He even did three web ads... only Tiles but, frankly, what he produced was far, far better than what most of our Designers throw together for the web. He even kept within the file size limit on two of them, while the third should have been done with Flash, had it been available on the machine we placed him on.

I was honestly thrilled with the work he'd done, and it gave me a little bit of hope for Designers of the future.

As long as Design College doesn't ruin him...

I shall be popping back to Swindon this weekend for the Christening of my niece... Quite looking forward to it, as long as the travel isn't too bad... Just need to make sure I pack tonight!