If you've a good idea what you want to do when you leave school and you really want to try it out, your teachers may let you arrange your own work experience by contacting a suitable local company yourself. Check with your guidance teacher to see if this would be possible. Keep a note of them when you've finished, so you can refer back to them when thinking about what you've achieved at school and about what skills, knowledge and experience you would like to develop in the future. At the end of the placement, your guidance or another teacher will carry out a 'debriefing' to look at how things went and find out what you've learned from the experience. You can keep details of your work experience in your Progress File.
Work experience is really good.
It gives you a chance to find out what work is really like. Case Study - Gillian Gillian is doing Standard Grades in physics, chemistry, French, English, maths, PE, modern studies and administration. Her favourite subject is PE and she's thinking about becoming a PE teacher. Gillian discovered that work experience is very different from school. My work experience gave me the chance to find out what I could do and what I couldn't do.