Whilst rummaging around for the Leeds Inclusive Employer Network banner in a cupboard full of banner cases that all look the same, one of my colleagues mentioned that there was a shout-out for supported internships on breakfast tv yesterday. I don’t know about you, but all I’m capable of in a morning is drinking my coffee whilst trying to summon the energy to wrestle my cat off my breakfast, never mind watching serious people talking about serious things. Hence why I’m a day late talking about #supportedinternships. So, here is this week’s Lighthouse Futures Trust longform Blog – also on our website.

We asked on LinkedIn last week what people would like to hear more about from Lighthouse Futures Trust, and one of the things that came out on top was ‘what do you do’ and whilst we’re endeavouring to be more chatty and have more of an online and community presence, you’re correct in saying that we can do much better at telling you what we do. And following on from a tv appearance of the topic ‘supported internships’ it’s only right that today we start to unpick what that is and why they’re important.

We all did work experience at school. We were told that we had to and if you were lucky your parents knew someone who worked somewhere cool and so you were shipped off for five glorious days with cool ‘Aunty’ Jane to work at that place with the table tennis table. I swept up and washed hair for five days, and for someone that doesn’t like touching other people, and wasn’t that brilliant with strangers at age 16, I had a really awful time. Was it useful? Did I learn about the world of work? No. The highlight I remember was when one of them offered me a lollipop. I still went back to school none the wiser as to why we work or what on earth I wanted to do.

A series of jobs later and here I am at Lighthouse, finally understanding what I want from work, where I want to be and what I can offer. But what if we can offer that to young people earlier on? What if we didn’t need to fall from one job to another, a bit haphazard, whilst your parents unhelpfully ask why you never stay in one place for long? And let’s face it, I could move around and try different things. Aside from being an overly chatty female in sometimes male environments, it didn’t stop me from doing the things that I wanted or didn’t want to do.

How does that work if you have a disability, you’re neurodivergent, or you just can’t get on with a ‘traditional’ school or college environment?

Not only are there less opportunities but there are less employers (and their employees) who understand how to work with people that don’t look or work exactly like they do. We have one student who has successfully secured seven job interviews, but from which we’re hearing the same outcomes. In a lot of the cases, the people doing the interviews themselves maybe haven’t had unconscious bias training or don’t know how to get the best out of people – not all of us are good at interviewing and anything past the list of questions that HR have given us can be a challenge for some.

Supported internships therefore put us in a different position. They’re a year-long work placement where everyone has been trained and prepped for working together. Technically classed as a final year in education, the internship follows the academic year calendar, giving the student downtime to manage the change to working life, and they have a dedicated job coach supporting them the whole way through. For the employer, there is also training and support so that they know the young people they will be working with and the buddy/intern relationship is strong and works better. No one is left alone to flounder or feel uncomfortable, and everyone learns and grows. It’s a win win for everyone involved.

Are supported interns sweeping floors and washing hair? Only if that’s what they want to do! Ours are preparing and cooking meals in workplace canteens, checking your tax returns, taking your blood at the hospital. We’ve got dairy operatives, risk analysts, security officers, business administrators…the list goes on.

Supported internships are a game changer. They’re allowing those of us who have been previously overlooked into work. They’re allowing those of us who thought we couldn’t or would never have a job to be able to succeed. They’re a different route into employment and earning our own income than going down the ‘traditional’ and often overwhelming routes.

There are more people out there needing employers to consider taking on supported internships. So if you’re reading this and you think you’d like to give it a go, then do get in touch and we can talk. We look forward to hearing from you.

#LFTWednesdays #SupportedInternships