I was skeptical about virtual work experience — here’s what my daughter actually gained from Springpod
The laptop sat open on the kitchen table, and my daughter, sixteen, was staring at another video module about “a day in the life of a corporate lawyer.” It was the third one she’d watched that morning. I recognised the format by now: a polished professional talking at a screen, an activity sheet to download, a quiz to complete. On the surface, it looked like my own work experience from decades ago — except instead of photocopying documents and making tea in an actual office, she was doing everything from our kitchen, still in her school hoodie.
“I’m just clicking through this one,” she said, noticing me watching. “It’s a bit samey.”
I tried not to sound dismissive. “What have you actually got out of it so far?”
She paused the video and scrolled up through her notes. “We did a negotiation exercise yesterday. I had to argue a case. And there was a session with a barrister who talked about what they really do all day, not just what you see on TV.”
The honest answer is that I had doubts. When her school signed off on virtual work experience through Springpod, I assumed it would be a tick-box exercise — something done during lockdown that had somehow stuck around. And let’s be clear, there’s plenty about it that feels like ticking boxes. She’s completed modules for three different careers now, spending a week on each. Some of the content is repetitive, and the video quality varies. The engagement falls off when it’s just screen after screen of text with an occasional quiz.
But the more I listened to her talk about it, the more I realised I was measuring it against a version of work experience that no longer exists in most places. The offices that used to take in a handful of Year 10 students for a week are busier, more risk-averse, and less inclined to supervise teenagers. Her school can only organise so many physical placements. If the choice is virtual work experience or no work experience at all, it isn’t really a choice.
What surprised me, watching my daughter over several weeks, was that she wasn’t just clicking through. She was writing things down. She’d created a document where she recorded the skills each module mentioned — drafting emails, summarising long case files, preparing questions for clients. When her grandfather asked her what she’d done on the placement, she didn’t shrug and say “not much.” She described a mock legal negotiation where she had to persuade another student to lower her client’s claim. The software had prompted her to prepare arguments in advance, anticipate counterpoints, and then respond in real-time to someone she couldn’t see.
That last bit is telling. Video calls are second nature to this generation. The nerves I’d have felt negotiating with a stranger on camera simply aren’t there for her. She found the exercise easier than I would have at her age — probably because she’s used to talking to friends through a screen. But that’s not the same as talking to professionals, and there’s a difference she only discovered through the programme. The barrister who joined the live session was real and available. The small group she works with each week is made up of students from different schools. There’s risk in raising your hand when you’re not physically in a room with anyone. You have to care enough to unmute yourself.
At one point she got a certificate for completing a module about legal ethics, and I noticed she printed it out. That bothered me slightly. I keep waiting for the moment she realises these qualifications don’t carry much weight with universities or employers. They aren’t graded. They don’t prove she can do the work. They prove she sat through a course and answered some questions — and any reasonable person could do that.
But here’s what I’ve learned from living with a teenager doing these programmes: the output isn’t the point. The value is in the exposure before the experience. She now knows the difference between a solicitor and a barrister, which is more than I knew. She knows what a paralegal actually does. She understands that law involves enormous amounts of reading and writing, and she’s still interested. Six months ago she couldn’t have told you any of that. For a sixteen-year-old, having a few accurate details about a career is enough to make better subject choices, and that has genuine practical value.
The other thing I noticed is that she’s started doing something I didn’t teach her. She’s treating it like a job. She blocks out the time each afternoon, she dresses reasonably even at home, and she writes a short summary after each session about what she’d want to ask the professional if she met them in person. I never suggested any of this. It came from her — and I suspect it came from the structure of the platform itself, which asks participants to reflect after each module. That’s a useful habit, whatever you’re doing. It’s the kind of behaviour that translates to real interviews and real workplaces later on.
Not all of it impressed me, to be fair. One course she tried was just a series of videos with no interaction, and she abandoned it after two days. Another had a glitchy discussion forum that nobody moderated. The quality varies wildly depending on who created the content and how much effort they put in. If a teacher or parent is considering these platforms, it’s worth sitting down with a teenager and looking at the course structure first, not just the title. If there’s no live component, no opportunity to ask questions, and no activity that requires them to produce something — a written response, a recorded pitch, a presentation — then it’s probably just content consumption with a certificate at the end. That’s not the same as a work experience.
What I’ve landed on, watching this unfold over the past few months, is that virtual programmes work best as a supplement rather than a substitute. My daughter still needs real exposure to workplaces. She needs to walk into an office, smell the coffee, see how people talk to each other in person, and understand the unspoken rules that no module can teach. Those opportunities are rarer now, but they’re not impossible. She’s applied for a one-day in-person insight event at a local firm, and I’m hoping an actual person in an actual building will call her next week.
Until then, the virtual stuff is doing something I didn’t expect. It’s keeping her engaged with possibilities. It’s helping her narrow things down before spending a full week somewhere that isn’t right. And it’s giving her a vocabulary for talking about work — what she learned, what she’d do differently, what excites her and what puts her off.
She still wonders whether it counts for anything. The other day she said, “If I put Springpod on my CV, will people think I’m just making it up?” I didn’t have a clean answer. What matters is not the platform name on the CV. What matters is what she can say she learned, and whether she can back it up in conversation. The certificate fades; the specifics stick around.
I’m still not completely convinced that these programmes are worth the hype some schools give them. But I’ve stopped dismissing them. Last night she came downstairs with a screenshot of a job description for a legal assistant, showing me the person specification and pointing out which parts she’d completed through the module. She highlighted the communication section. I could see she was proud.
Whether that translates into a real job one day is still unknown. She’s got years before that matters. For now, she’s learning something about work that I don’t think school alone teaches her: that these careers belong to real people who started somewhere, and that she’s already begun. That counts for more than I initially gave it credit for.
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