[00:00:00] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Hello, everybody. I am Scott Byrne-Fraser. I am the technical co founder here at hundo, um, and I'm very excited to be joined today by Ozzy and Brandon, who are students who have taken part in our virtual work experiences before. Uh, so hello both. Um, would you like to introduce yourselves? 

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[00:00:25] Brandon: So I'm Brandon, uh, I'm a Level 2 student at South Staffordshire College.

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[00:00:29] Ozzy: And I'm Ozzy, I'm on the Level 3 of the same course. 

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[00:00:33] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Fantastic, it's great, it's great to meet you both. And I guess I'll dive straight into the first question. You know, so, how important is gaining work experience for students like yourselves? You know, and how do you believe it will benefit you in terms of creating your career from this point onwards?

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[00:00:49] Brandon: Uh, I think work experience is, uh, good cause, When, like, employers want to see, like, what skills you've got and, like, what mindset you've got towards the job, it's very important. 

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[00:00:59] Scott Byrne-Fraser: And, I guess, off the back of that, you know, what excites you most about entering the world of work? You know, do you have any concerns about starting your career?

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[00:01:07] Brandon: Um, nah, I like learning new skills, so I think it'd be great. Really good to learn new skills in a workplace, but other than that, no, not really. Just keen to get on. Yeah. 

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[00:01:17] Ozzy: Yeah, I think it'll be good to meet a lot of people, like, with the same interests as well. Like, I feel like when you get into the world of work, everyone's got the same, like, they're what, they're all looking for the same thing.

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So I think that's going to be quite good as well. 

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[00:01:30] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Yeah, that is very true. Once you start your career, you suddenly find yourself surrounded by like minded people who have been typically on a similar path to yourselves, which is always, always really, really interesting. Um, and how do you feel about exploring, you know, different career paths or options?

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And, you know, do you believe that school and college has offered you enough support to get to the stage where you're at now? 

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[00:01:49] Brandon: Uh, I believe, yes, college has given us enough support, such as, uh, our tutors and teaching us how to learn new skills, such as, like, I don't know, when we design, like, computer stuff.

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Um, yeah, so I think we learn new skills and it's good. 

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[00:02:03] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Great, and when it comes to work experience and preparing for the future, you know, what advice do you wish educators and employers had given students like yourselves, or could give students like yourselves? 

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[00:02:15] Ozzy: I think it's important that, like, I feel like schools, a lot of the time, they always say, like, you need to plan it for the rest of your life and have it kind of set in stone.

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But I think a lot of the time, we need to give people more advice that things can change and that's not necessarily a bad thing. And I feel like we need to set people up for a wider range of careers rather than telling them to set in stone with one. 

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[00:02:39] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Yeah, I totally agree with that. I mean, if the message you're getting is to plan your entire career out from the day, day one, when you leave college, I mean, one that's incredibly hard and quite daunting and also not massively realistic.

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You know, there's very few people once they've been 25 years into their career are doing the same thing they thought they were going to be doing when they left college. It does happen. Don't get me wrong. There are people out there who have a clear career path. I think it's very rare though. I'd say it's more and more nowadays.

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You know, for people to go into a role and for that role to go with them for more than five, six years, people want to adapt. People have different skillsets. You know, I've certainly been in this industry for 20 odd years now. And what I do nowadays is very different to what I was doing 20 years ago. I'd never expected I'd be interviewing people on video, you know, 20 odd years ago, but probably freaked out and run a mile if you told me that's what I was going to end up doing.

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Um, but you know, I got to this point. It's, it's interesting how things do change. Um, And actually, so moving on to the next question, you know, so in terms of virtual work experience, you know, it's becoming more and more popular to do virtual hybrid, uh, work experiences. How do you think work at virtual work experience is as an alternative to, you know, traditional in, in sort of situ placements or in office placements?

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Uh, I 

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[00:03:48] Brandon: think it's good because you can ask more questions, sound like a virtual base, instead of like it being normal class and there's more students, it's more head on, so you can answer, like ask more questions to people. Uh, it's also good because side people can't actually get to, uh, like their social area.

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Yeah. Uh, I could literally just log online and do it there, which I think would be really good. 

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[00:04:13] Ozzy: I do think it can depend on the, um, on the career though. 'cause like some, it would be totally unrealistic to try and do it online if it's, you know, something physical. But I think in, in places like it, it is one of the best things that you can do.

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[00:04:28] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Yeah, I think you make a good point about the physical, the physicality, nature of some types of roles as well, where that's obviously more challenging to do a virtual space. Um, I got asked a very smart question a few weeks back by a, by a student who was actually interested in being, you know, running a gardening business.

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Um, and he asked, you know, how could virtual work experience help with gardening? Uh, which I thought was a really interesting challenge because obviously you don't you never do gardening virtual. It's just not the way it operates Um, but when he sat down and actually went through one of the courses and saw that, you know It would support him in marketing.

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It would support him with entrepreneurship. It would support him, you know running a business He could see how that could be applied. So I think you're absolutely right There's certain there's certain roles where it doesn't necessarily make sense But then there's still bits of it that you can apply to, you know, almost any almost any type of role How has hundo's platform helped you prepare for your future work?

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And what are you most excited about our new virtual work experience programs? 

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[00:05:19] Brandon: Um, I think hundo's helped me so it's better to learn all new skills on like a computer, such as, uh, what we're doing, which is IT. I feel like, uh, I'm learning a lot more new skills towards a new environment. So like work, work experiences gave me a lot new, a lot more new skills.

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[00:05:40] Ozzy: Yeah, it's like learning a lot of different, like, professional softwares in one place, working on a project. I think that's the best way to do it, because, like, if you're learning the theory side of it all, it's, no, it's completely different to working on a project. 

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[00:05:56] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Yeah, very true, very true. I think the, the theory and the reality are often very different in terms of how real projects work.

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And certainly when I was learning, you know, I learned the best way of running a particular project and the best approach to doing things. And it. It often works in one context, but then put within a real life project, when you're working with real people with real challenges, where it's quite fluid, it's quite dynamic, it's quite interesting how, uh, it's quite variable in terms of the tools that you need to use and the approaches that you take, and there's no right or wrong answer in most cases, and I think that's certainly one of the key important things that I've learned, certainly since I left college was that there's, there's a lot of variability in terms of what we do.

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So it's fantastic that you're, you're, you're learning that from the programs themselves. So what advice would you like to give young people watching this about careers and the future of work who might feel a bit nervous about their next steps? 

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[00:06:47] Brandon: Uh, that even if they did a course such as IT or PE or whatever in college, that they don't have to set that as their actual goal and that they can choose to do different courses later on or do different job roles in the future.

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And that they don't have to actually set their path. And they can do whatever they like. 

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[00:07:09] Ozzy: Yeah, I think as well, it's important that a lot of people think like, Oh, I'm nervous, I'm not going to do it, I need to sort, I need to stop being nervous to start with. But I think instead you should take that feeling and put it into your work.

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Because I think being nervous is one of the best ways that you can, you know, progress and do better work. 

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[00:07:30] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Absolutely. Absolutely. You never stop being nervous. You just change the way you react to the nerves. I think that's the key thing you learn is that nerves actually means that you're challenging yourself and you're pushing yourself.

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So yeah, I think you're absolutely right. You know, when you feel that nervousness, use it as a motivator rather than something to hold you back. I think that's, that's incredibly important. And so thinking about your future careers, do you know what you want to do when you leave college? Um, so 

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[00:07:54] Brandon: at the moment I'm doing IT and I think it's really good and I like website designing and stuff like that and I think that when I'm older I will be doing website designing but at the moment, uh, I'm not too sure what I want to do.

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[00:08:08] Ozzy: Yeah, I'm not too sure either but I'm very open to finding new opportunities I think, so. 

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[00:08:14] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Yeah, that's fair enough. And how do you think the hundo platform can help you with exploring different career options? 

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[00:08:23] Brandon: Uh, teach us new skills. So, uh, teach us new skills about, uh, different workplaces, uh, which might make us gravitate towards different, like, job opp uh, job opportunities.

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[00:08:35] Ozzy: Yeah, and I think that, especially the employers bit on the hundo website, that is so useful to find new opportunities. Uh, yeah, so I think that's really, really useful. 

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[00:08:46] Scott Byrne-Fraser: Fantastic. Well, it was absolutely lovely chatting to you both today. Really interesting to learn about your journey so far with hundo and about your thoughts on your next steps.

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So for anyone else listening out there who would like to learn more about hundo, come to hundo.xyz and you can find out about the fantastic new virtual work experience programs are launching. Uh, learn more. You can also follow hundo social channels. To keep abreast of all the latest information and news about the programs that we're launching.