Looking for Work

Interesting bit of information I learned after an interview with a recruitment agency (yes, I've been sending out my resume - CV as they prefer to call it here). Apparently, there are graduates out there looking for work who have never done any work experience. Work experience here is what we call On-the-Job-Training in the Philippines. This is where you work for a company for free for a set time. Back in the Philippines, most OJTs were more of the making coffee, organising files and running errands kind of things. It was more observation that actual work being done. If your supervisor was the mentoring kind, you'd be invited to meetings and maybe even given an actual task / project to work on. 

Here, work experience require more from the students. I've done quality control for one designer, sewing garments for a factory owner, preparing spreadsheets and calculating gross margins and other financial data for a retail company and sat on video conferences and meetings / presentations for another company. My classmates did patterns, stitching, and sewing for designers. 

Sewing a garment 

In RMIT, students of the Visual Merchandising course, according to the lecturer we met in our class excursion, are required to do 70 hours (I think) of work experience. It could be with just one company / person or with a number of companies as long as they complete the 70 hours required. In addition, the school has partnered with some companies and have given briefs to the students to work on. 

RMIT Students' Visual Window for Ray's Outdoors

The objective is not only to give an idea of how the "real world" operates, but also to allow students to put theory into reality. Another objective is for students to build their networks. Now, I hate networking. I don't like the idea of going to places and exchanging business cards or pretend to be interested to obtain other people's business cards. But someone told me that networking doesn't have to be that way. Networking can simply be knowing the employees in the place you're having your work experience, knowing what they do, learning from them and keeping in contact with them. 

Eventually, you might even end up being genuine friends with them as opposed to being user-friendly. 

Doing work experience also gives you first dibs on vacant positions in the company. If you were good at what you did and you had good rapport with people, there's no reason the company wouldn't consider you unless you had no permission to work in the country, then that's different (although a company might consider sponsoring you under a certain type of visa but I'm not sure if that still works what with the visa changes they've been doing recently at the immigration department).

So, go forth and do work experience! It could be fun. It could be painful. It could be interesting. But you'll learn a lot.