Designing work experience

My daughter's joining me for work experience next week. Unlike my work experience in 1996, which was organised by school based on my interests, she was expected to find her own. Unfortunately, despite approaching multiple places to gain work experience around physiotherapy, she was unsuccessful.

So she's stuck with her dad. I'm going to try to make the four days (she's at football day release on Friday) at least fairly interesting. So we'll go to coffee shops and co-working spaces, and she'll get to work on a mini-studio project designing a product relevant to her passions. My plan for her week is below:

Work experience plan [PDF]

She's going to have Strategyzer's Value Proposition Design book handy, as well as some printouts from their website to help scaffold her thinking. I'm very aware that I need to ensure she doesn't see this as a 'textbook' and series of 'worksheets'. I want her to have some structure, without it feeling like school.

One of the things I've been talking to her about in preparation is how the kind of job I do allows you to go with your energy levels. With rare exceptions, I'm not expected to 'perform' at a particular time or place, which means I can organise the things I need to do depending on times which suit me best.

In my experience, the pandemic was good for that kind of thing for kids. My daughter, in particular, who was pretty young at the time, absolutely motored through the things she was set for the day and then played football and relaxed in the afternoon.