Work Experience Schemes and Part‐time Jobs in a Recruitment Context

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Abstract
This paper examines the significance of work experience schemes and part‐time jobs for school pupils within the context of recruitment to youth jobs. Specifically, it focuses on the role played by work experience and part‐time jobs in the recruitment of young people to engineering apprenticeships in a Midlands town during the recession of the early 1980s. The employers gave greater importance to holiday jobs, Saturday jobs and paper rounds than work experience in recruiting apprentices. The former were viewed as a more effective guide to applicants’ work attitudes. Work experience lacked the element of ‘sacrifice’ and other aspects associated with ‘real’ work Despite this, work experience proliferated in the 1980s, whilst pupils’ part‐time work has been neglected as a learning resource. Additionally, this paper presents the more general argument that a strong vocationalist perspective on work experience, where it is viewed as being grounded in the labour‐power demands of employers as expressed in recruitment criteria, yields unacceptable (racist and sexist) consequences.

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