Cisco Work Experience – What happens in an IT Company? Getting inside those shiny buildings
2 min read
78 young people, 2 locations, 2 streams and over 180 Cisco volunteers (and counting)!
If you’re a young person living in Feltham you’re surrounded by big glass fronted buildings housing global IT companies, Cisco, IBM and SAP, but we know from local organisations working with young people, that you’re unlikely to know anyone who works there.
That’s why Cisco Connected Women started a programme targeting students in year 9, just making their GCSE choices, called Girls /Kids In IT, where they get a chance to visit Cisco for the day and be inspired to work in the IT industry and include STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) in their choices. The success of Kids in IT led to Work Ready Evenings where we invite older students to learn more about the world of work.
But the feedback from the young people coming through these programmes and from the Cisco supported University Technical Colleges (UTCs), was that they were looking for more and were hoping to spend their work experience at Cisco. So we needed to move from a one-off, ad-hoc experience to a structured work experience programme delivering insight, inspiration, education and fun.
And so was born the new Cisco Work Experience programme which ran in Bedfont Lakes, Feltham and Green Park, Reading during November, with 78 young people in Years 10 & 11 coming in to Cisco from schools local to each location plus friends and family of Cisco UK employees.
The new Work Experience programme had technical and business streams. The technical stream covered the wide variety of technical roles available at Cisco including software, hardware and even the manufacture of Smart Cards. Definitely the student’s favourite sessions were being electrocuted (in a very safe way!) when learning about ESD and electrocuting a jelly baby when programming a Raspberry Pi!
In the business stream we highlighted that not everyone who works in IT is technical with great sessions from HR, sales, marketing & communications, workplace resources and finance. With the help of the team from the Cisco TV Bedfont Lakes studio the groups in the business stream made a video as part of their marketing and communications day which you can see here.
We also tried to improve the soft skills of the groups through ‘speed-interviewing’ with Cisco managers and a session on Pathways to Success where some of our leaders shared their career pathways since school. I’ll spare their blushes but we do have successful senior managers in our business who started work in retail, trained as geologists, worked in leisure centre management and who could forget the leader told by his careers advisor to lower his expectations when he said he wanted to be a painter & decorator! We tried to emphasise that we do need people with strong academic backgrounds but Cisco recruits the whole person with attitude, ability to work in a team and other similar skills as a critical part of our decision making.
The feedback from the students was outstanding!
- 100% said that they would recommend a friend to Cisco in the future
- 100% said that they had been influenced in their future decisions
- Overall the programme scored 4.6/5!
Thanks to the efforts of our Cisco volunteers, who created and ran sessions on their own area of expertise or supported us in the general sessions.
With such a strong response and great feedback we’re hoping to run the programme again in the June/July timeframe – if you would like more information go to: https://www.facebook.com/ciscoworkexp
Authors
2 Comments
Dear Madam,
I have looked at your facebook page and have noticed that you are aiming to run this scheme again in June/July. I would be really interested in taking part, however I am now in Year 12 and am not sure as to whether I meet the criteria. Would you provide me some further information on this?
Thank you
Tanya
Great article. Really gives a great sense of how the weeks went. I’ve told friends working for other large corporate companies about our work experience and they all think it’s a fantastic programme. They’re particularly impressed and interested in the idea that the programme welcomes students who may never have imagined that Cisco was a place they could work. I think we may have started something!