Four students, endless opportunities: a week of work experience at KW

Opening our doors to the next generation has always mattered to us.

Not because it gives us a neat thing to post about, but because proper work experience can genuinely be life-changing for the students who come in, and for us as a team. Bold statement - we know - but in our experience, true.

A couple of weeks ago, we welcomed four Year 10 students for a week of work experience - Isabelle, Edward, and Charlotte from Caistor Grammar School, alongside Zak, who joined us from Caistor Yarborough.

Across the week, they were given a real flavour of agency life and an introduction to the world of marketing. That meant learning more about what marketing actually involves, hearing from our team to discover how vast marketing actually is, getting under the skin of real-time project briefs, and exploring how ideas become campaigns.

Their main project focused on Lincolnshire’s visitor economy, with the students looking at how the area is presented online, what might encourage people to discover more of it, and how marketing can turn audience interest into action. They researched visitor attractions, explored campaign ideas, considered audiences, thought about social content, and looked at how tools like gamification could help make a campaign more engaging.

It was exactly the kind of task we like to set. Structured enough to give direction, but open enough to let different strengths come through.

The week finished with presentations on the Friday morning, giving the students the chance to share what they had worked on, explain their thinking and talk through their ideas with the team.

That final presentation moment is always important. It is not just about showing the finished work. It is about confidence, communication, answering questions, explaining decisions and seeing that their ideas are worth putting in front of people.

For us, that is where the value of work experience really comes to life.

Good work experience should not mean sitting quietly in the corner, watching people answer emails, or being handed a bit of busy work to fill time. It should give young people a proper insight into the workplace. It should show them the range of roles that exist in an industry. It should help them understand the varied paths people take to find their way into a career. And, ideally, it should give them a chance to contribute something too.

This is why we keep doing it. Work experience is part of a much wider commitment to nurturing the next generation. We know first-hand that routes into creative industries are not always obvious, and definitely not linear, especially outside major cities. We also know that one conversation, one week, or one good experience can make a difference to how someone sees their options.

Some of our own team have come to us through work experience, apprenticeships or early-career opportunities. Emily and Zoe first came to KW for work experience before later joining the team full-time, while others across the agency have taken different routes into marketing, design, content, client services and development. There is no single pathway into this industry, and that is exactly why it is so important to show young people what the possibilities look like.

Work experience also brings fresh energy to the team. It makes us explain what we do in plain English. It challenges us to create briefs that are useful, interesting and achievable. It reminds us how much we have learned ourselves. And it gives everyone a moment to step back from the day-to-day and remember why creative work can be exciting in the first place.

More than anything, it strengthens the link between local businesses and local education. If we want young people to feel confident about the world of work, businesses have a part to play. Schools, colleges and universities cannot do it all on their own.

So, to Izzy, Edward, Charlotte and Zak, thank you for spending the week with us.

And who knows - maybe we will see some of you back in the creative industries one day.