How can museums offer work experience online?

The Museum of London’s work experience weeks – held annually in the summer term – are often my favourite weeks of the whole academic year.

Inviting enthusiastic 14- to 18-year-olds to learn how the museum runs is challenging, eye-opening and rewarding. Our conundrum this year was how to replicate our successful work experience programme when the museum was closed to the public without access to the galleries, offices, or stores.

Background

Funded by Arts Council England, the work experience programme is managed jointly as part of the museum’s volunteering programme and the secondary schools programme.

All departments across the museum are encouraged to participate by choosing a designated work experience champion who manages the workloads of the young people joining us, with an aim to provide authentic work tasks that contribute to the museum’s strategic objectives.

Students can be placed in either heritage departments or familiar business departments also available in the private sector. During the week students are allocated two days in two different departments, with the rest of the time given to whole group reflection activities.

To be eligible for the programme, young people must attend an insight day where they learn from our work experience champions about their career pathways, their roles and the skills they apply daily. Before they leave, the young people choose their three favourite departments they would like to be placed in.

In 2019 we had 80 young people attend the insight day, with 40 of those attending being allocated a work experience placement.

Responding to a need

We were planning our May 2020 insight day when the government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic meant the museum had to be closed to the public.

We decided to explore the possibility of offering online sessions and, crucially at this point, we asked the young people what they wanted from us via a survey.

Our first, surprising, discovery was that there was a demand for online careers sessions that included direct access to our work experience champions. Our second, and less surprising, discovery was that anything we planned would need to be scheduled for the afternoon, with 88% of the respondents asking for sessions to start after midday.

Students also told us how long the sessions should be (60 minutes was fine, 90 minutes was not); what content styles most interested them (a series of shorter workshops not a long one-off workshop); and what format the workshops should take (interactive where possible).

Our new online work experience taster sessions

Our next step was to consult our team of work experience champions to discuss how we might be able to create an online programme using the survey results.

As a group, we decided that the most important part of this opportunity was maintaining the authenticity of the work experience, providing 'real work tasks' and reassuring us and the young people that these sessions were worth our collective time.

This resulted in a series of 10 afternoon workshops across three weeks in the summer term, with our work experience champions designing unique tasks that had real outputs.

These ranged from training sessions delivered by the human resources department and the Memories of London team, who engage people living with dementia. The venue hire team asked the young people to think of innovative solutions on how to solve social distancing problems at their events, while curatorial and exhibition display created tasks analysing how objects tell a story.

At the heart of all the tasks created was the much-loved museum and its collections, that we could evoke through the website and our work experience champions.

What we learnt along the way

Beyond considering how safeguarding procedures must be adapted for online sessions, and that the internet can be unstable (regardless of how stable it was before the session begins), we've learnt lots along the way.

One of our initial hurdles was briefing the work experience champions, ensuring the dates were in their diaries and that the taster tasks would represent real work tasks the young people would have been given at the museum.

For some of our staff who were on furlough, this meant the planning and delivery of the session happened very quickly or they were unable to participate at all.

For other departments, work experience tasks could not be translated into an online format, as they were practical, hands-on and based on the museum’s collections.

Delivering sessions online takes up much more staff capacity than we originally anticipated. We thought we would be able to manage with only two staff members per session (the facilitator and the work experience champion). The more detailed our risk assessments got, the more we realised we would need an additional staff member in the session to lead on safeguarding, watching and responding to the chat box and monitoring the screens when other members of staff were sharing their own.

In the comments section of our initial survey the young people gave us hints to things we might need to consider. Most of this was content based (they really wanted to learn about how to create exhibitions). Other comments helped with housekeeping and safeguarding as it included statements around access to webcams and technology.

For us, this intel was vital as it shaped the guidelines we sent to the work experience champions managing our expectations, and to the participants managing their expectations.

What the participants thought

During the 10 sessions we engaged 52 young people, with many of them attending multiple times. As they took place over Zoom, we used the opportunity to gather feedback using the online tool mentimetre.

This meant we had data for each session from almost all the participants. Generally, the sessions were marked positively, with 93% of the young people stating the sessions were either brilliant or great.

We struggled with how long the sessions should be and what the pace should be like. This was often linked to the difficulty of finding the perfect online 'real work task'.

The tasks were the most problematic part of the programme. Each work experience champion designed a unique task, which meant that the young people might need shorter or longer time to complete it online and send it back to us via the chat function or as an email attachment.

But we knew nothing about the competency, enthusiasm and technology available to the young people participating, so we struggled to identify the right amount of time.

Another challenge was increasing interactivity as the young people taking part were unwilling to unmute or speak verbally throughout the workshops. Our work experience champions responded by asking more direct questions so young people could respond in the chat.

The evaluation also showed that the young people wanted individual feedback for each task they completed, so if we were to do these online sessions again we would build this into the work experience champions’ time.

What next?

Towards the end of July, we’ll be sending out attendance certificates to the young people and asking them to complete one last survey, in the hope it’ll help us understand the impact of the sessions in more detail.

Collecting this information is useful for the work experience champions and it will also help us prepare if we need or decide to offer online work experience again in the future.

We know that online work experience does not replace the experience of being in a workplace, but these sessions did support the young people to discover more about careers in museums, and the evaluation showed they would recommend the sessions to friends.

Laura Turnage is the programme manager (secondary schools) at the Museum of London