Meaningful work experience for young people often comes down to the moments they remember from a first job. It might be the new uniform, unfamiliar faces or the mild panic of seeing a till and a stockroom before 10am. Then someone adds six different procedures and says, “You’ll soon pick it up.”
What tends to matter most, though, is the person who helped them pick it up.
This week, the government and some of Britain’s biggest retailers launched Opening Shift. The programme will offer unemployed 18 to 24-year-olds between two and four weeks of workplace experience. Retailers have already pledged more than 11,000 placements as the sector works towards creating 100,000 jobs for young people.
The ambition is easy to applaud. Between April and June 2026, an estimated 981,000 people aged 16 to 24 in the UK were not in education, employment or training (NEET). The harder part begins when those young people arrive for their first shift. A placement gives someone access to a workplace. Whether it builds confidence, useful skills and a route into employment depends heavily on the people around them.
That makes the workplace support promised by Opening Shift far more than a nice extra. Buddies will need more than good intentions, a quick tour and directions to the staff kitchen. They need the skills to explain, encourage and give useful feedback. This is how the scheme’s national ambition becomes a valuable experience for each young person.
Getting through the door is only the beginning
Opening Shift tackles an absurd problem that has been allowed to sound normal: young people need experience to get a job, but need a job to get experience.
Creating the opportunity is important, but the quality of the placement will determine what young people can take from it.
A meaningful placement gives a young person more than a line on their CV:
- It lets them contribute to real work at an appropriate level.
- See how people behave in a workplace.
- Ask questions without feeling like a nuisance and receive feedback they can use.
They should leave with a clearer understanding of what they can do and how to talk about it in their next interview.
Simply being present at work does not guarantee any of that; someone can spend two weeks in a building and learn little beyond the location of the staff kitchen and which cupboard contains the decent biscuits.
That is why one detail in the Opening Shift announcement stands out: every participant will receive dedicated workplace support from a mentor or buddy. It may sound like a small operational detail, but in practice it could be the part that makes the whole idea work.
The person beside them becomes part of the learning
The workplace comes with hundreds of unwritten rules:
- How to ask for help
- When to take initiative
- What good customer service sounds like when the customer is less than delighted
- How to admit a mistake before it develops its own email chain
Experienced employees have absorbed these things so thoroughly that they can forget they ever had to learn them. A young person entering work for the first time has not.
They learn by watching other people, trying things for themselves and noticing how colleagues respond. A patient explanation builds confidence, while a dismissive look can stop questions for the rest of the week.
This is why buddying cannot end with pointing out the toilets and adding someone to a group chat. Saying “give me a shout if you need anything” sounds friendly enough. It also depends on a nervous new starter feeling comfortable enough to interrupt.
Good support is more deliberate. It makes expectations clear, checks understanding and creates regular moments for questions. It gives someone room to try and makes it safe to get things wrong. Above all, it helps people build confidence instead of assuming they should arrive with it.
The same is true of mentoring more broadly. Mentoring works best when the conversations do. A job title does not automatically make someone a good listener or equip them to give useful feedback.
Mentors need support too
Opening Shift asks something very specific of the people on the shop floor. Managers and buddies will be welcoming young adults with different levels of confidence, different experiences of education and, in some cases, health conditions or other barriers that have kept them out of work. Some participants will ask plenty of questions, while others may stay quiet precisely when they need help.
Supporting them properly will take judgement, patience and time. It will also be another responsibility for employees who already have jobs to do, customers to help and inboxes that have shown no interest in the nation’s youth employment ambitions.
That extra work needs to be recognised. If mentoring is quietly added to somebody’s role with no time, guidance or preparation, even the most enthusiastic buddy may struggle to give a young person the attention they need. “Be a good mentor” is a lovely sentiment, but a rather incomplete development plan.
Before placements begin, employees should know what is expected of them and have a chance to prepare. They need to think through how they will explain a task, check understanding without sounding like an examiner and respond when somebody makes a mistake. They also need to recognise that what looks like a lack of interest may be nerves, uncertainty or a young person trying very hard not to get anything wrong.
How learning supports meaningful work experience for young people
This does not require L&D to build a heroic new programme whenever the organisation welcomes a young person. Ready-made, flexible learning can reduce the preparation burden and support mentors before and during a placement. It cannot conduct the conversation for them or add a spare hour to Wednesday afternoon, sadly. It can help them use the time they have more confidently.
Video Arts’ Leadership collection helps employees develop human-centred leadership, psychological safety and team development. Our Conversations, Coaching & Mentoring collection focuses on the moments buddies and mentors will face. It covers active listening, constructive feedback, coaching goals and common mentoring traps.
We build the learning around recognisable scenarios that show how these conversations play out. Employees can consider their response before a new participant is standing in front of them. Preparing mentors also gives L&D a practical way to support the programme without personally hovering beside every first shift.
Give people something they can recognise as progress
There is another risk with short placements. Employers know what participants have been exposed to, but young people may leave without the language to explain what they have learned.
They may have dealt with customers, adapted when priorities changed, worked with unfamiliar colleagues and solved small problems all day. Ask what skills they developed, and the answer may still be, “I stacked shelves.”
The problem is that nobody has helped them translate an ordinary shift into the communication, judgement and problem-solving skills they demonstrated during it.
Reflection helps turn experience into something a person can carry forward. A short conversation at the end of a shift can make the difference:
- What felt easier today than it did on Monday?
- When did you have to change your approach?
- What did you handle well?
- What would you try differently next time?
Those questions help people notice their own communication, judgement, resilience and teamwork. They also give them examples to use in the job interview promised at the end of the programme.
Recent work on making work experience meaningful reaches a similar conclusion: the strongest experiences have clear learning outcomes, preparation and a chance to reflect afterwards. The placement itself matters, but so does helping the person understand what changed because of it.
The opportunity is bigger than Opening Shift
Retail is unusually well placed to give young people this start because it already accounts for almost a quarter of youth employment in Britain and offers something no simulated exercise can quite reproduce: real customers, real colleagues and real responsibility.
Opening Shift is therefore a serious opportunity to give thousands of young people the experience employers keep asking for and the evidence that they are capable of more than their employment history currently suggests. Yet the basic idea does not belong exclusively to large retailers or government programmes.
Employers across different sectors can offer work experience, apprenticeships and entry-level opportunities that give young people a way in. That might mean hundreds of placements, or it might mean one. No parliamentary summit or launch graphic required.
Meaningful work experience for young people can start with one role
For organisations concerned about future skills, recruiting young people can strengthen talent pipelines and bring different perspectives into the workplace. Employers must then offer meaningful work and support the people responsible for guiding it. Those mentors need enough time, confidence and direction to do the job well.
Managers, colleagues and buddies create the impact in ordinary moments. They explain why something matters, notice when someone has gone quiet and give honest feedback with care. These moments rarely make national headlines, but they are the work that makes those headlines possible.
Opening the door gives a young person an opportunity. Preparing someone to welcome them, teach them and take them seriously is what turns that opportunity into a start.
Your organisation may be ready to provide meaningful work experience for young people. If you also want to equip employees to support them well, start a conversation with the Video Arts team. We can help prepare mentors through our Leadership and Conversations, Coaching & Mentoring collections, alongside learning for the wider workforce.
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