Career Hub - Students work experience with Tewkesbury Library

The Career Hub is an exclusive, extended work placement programme for Level 3 students and local Gloucestershire businesses.

Anne Careless, Team Leader from Tewkesbury Library mentored one of our Career Hub students, Tymo, for work experience and explained what they both gained from their week together.

“We believe that libraries are great places for young people to do work experience; they are trusted, safe spaces which engage communities in all aspects of information and learning. They also have staff that are used to assisting members of the community to access information and learning, so are well placed to support students.

At Tewkesbury Library we have been developing opportunities for work experience students which offer a chance to develop skills through projects such as improving the performance of a section of stock, working on local history projects and leading children’s activity sessions. This is one way we can demonstrate our enthusiasm to be a learning hub for all.

We always find it beneficial having work experience students in as children love sessions led by teenagers/young adults, and having an extra pairs of hands enables us to develop areas which might have had to be put on hold. Tymo’s age group is not particularly well represented as library users, so seeing work experience and Duke of Edinburgh students in libraries has a positive effect on these numbers; we have certainly seen an increase over the last few years.

We were approached by Gloucestershire College as Tymo had expressed an interest in doing his work experience with us. Although we already have two sixth form work experience students from other educational establishments on a one day a week basis, we were particularly interested in offering Tymo a placement as he has expertise in IT. One of our current aims is to offer more STEM activities for children.

We try to tailor tasks to provide an interesting experience for students. While Tymo did assist with shelving and display work his main focus was to design a simple first workshop on coding for children. He was asked to plan a one-hour session, create a work book and deliver the session to a small number of home educated children. In addition, he had the chance to visit our new Innovation Lab in Coleford to see where libraries are going with digital provision for the public. Tymo created an excellent instructional booklet on MicroBits and took 8 children through it. They all had a great time and we have heard from one family that their children have taken out coding books to continue learning. The booklet itself has been added to the Library Service STEM resources.

The qualities we look for in a work experience student are a willingness to learn, an ability to work unsupervised for some of the time, and is essential that they have an understanding of alphabetical order that goes beyond the first letter of a word.”

For more information, or to sign up to the Career Hub programme contact Gloucestershire College Career Hub via the phone number or email address below
Call: 01452 563220
Email: employability@gloscol.ac.uk

To contact Tewkesbury Library please call 01684 293086 or email tewkesburylibrary@gloucestershire.gov.uk