School work experience: If you’re still at school, trying to get relevant work experience can be challenging:
A lot of employers would like to support schools and provide work experience but are put off by the staff time it takes to keep the students occupied and safe for a week or two weeks.
It doesn’t have to be this way!
The Institute of Chartered Accountants have developed a work experience toolkit that provides sufficient accounting activities to keep a work experience student fully occupied for the week, with a minimum of your input.
These school work experience toolkits are available for free for members and can be downloaded for free from the ICAEW website here.
There are two separate packs in the toolkit:
1) School work experience ‘STUDENT PACK’
This contains:
a. A suggested training plan for a 5 days w/e period, referenced to the activities in the toolkit
b. Induction questionnaires for w/e obtained in both practice and industry
c. Background information on business structures, accounting records and financial statements
d. Guidance on how VAT works
e. A series of simple accounting activities, using a case study, requiring completion of a payments analysis, receipts analysis, petty cash book, bank reconciliation, completion of a fixed asset register, VAT Account, ending up with a Trial Balance, P&L A/C and a Balance Sheet.
Pro-formas are provided in order to make it easy!
f. A glossary of accounting terms and a simple accounting question bank
2) EMPLOYER PACK
This contains:
a. Guidance on how to use the Toolkit
b. A checklist for your induction and briefing to students on w/e, including health & safety issues
c. Suggested answers to all of the Student activities and question banks.
The accounting records can be completed by using the hard copy pro-formas in the toolkit, but we recommend that students draft these as excel spreadsheets. This helps develop invaluable spreadsheet skills.
By providing work experience to schools, or even to those on holiday or having just left school, employers get a chance to identify promising students who could be potential future employees.
However, many are put off by the fear of work experience students taking up too much of their staff’s precious time and they don’t realise that this ICAEW resource is available.
SO – bring it to their attention!?!!
If you are looking for a firm of Chartered Accountants to apply to, enter your local town into the ICAEW member firm search engine: https://find.icaew.com/ for names and addresses of firms near to you.
