Work experience is forced on all school pupils at one time or another, at least in Britain. The idea is that the pupil will find out what working in the real world is like. As such, she or he is thrust into a business, pretty much at random, for one or two weeks. They don't get paid, and are usually expected to perform all kinds of menial tasks.

In effect the experience is almost nothing like the experience of working in the real world, unless you have a great hankering to have a job making tea or coffee for the rest of your life.

Some students are lucky, and find themselves in a business that makes a good attempt to provide an authentic working environment for them, and doesn't treat them as lackeys. The Guardian is famous for this.

What you need in order to get a job. If you've already had a job, it's easy to fulfill this requirement and get a job. Otherwise, you'll need to get some work experience first.

Evidently this vicious cycle can be broken, since people (among them myself) do work. How this happens is unknown, even to the workers. But you can trust me: as someone who once had no work experience and now has a job, I can tell you that it is possible.

But I still don't know how, exactly.

This is something I am doing currently (as in right now).

Work experience doesn't just cover working in school affiliated programmes, it covers anything involving you and working. Start with anything you can get your hands on. I worked in Victoria Wine for 2 years of no thanks. What experience was relevant to working with computers? Working with people of course, which counts for a lot.
You can't expect to just get a job that requires a certain amount of experience, you need to work you way up the food chain first. Any experience is better than none, especially if it shows you are capable of getting off your arse. If you want a job in an area you've never worked in before, go for the graduate or new starter jobs. They are there, you just have to look.

The moral of the story?
The more experience you have, the higher up you are. After experience stops mattering you probably don't have to worry about moving up anymore.

Work experience at a vet: A guide

Several weeks ago I completed a week of work experience at a veterinary hospital, had a fantastic experience and learnt many things that may be helpful to others hoping to undertake work experience at a vet. I am repeating these in order for you to learn. Really, I enjoyed my week. And yes, I did learn first hand about the the things below.

Your jobs will include:

• Cleaning cages
• Cleaning poop
• Washing towels, scrubs and drapes
• Scrubbing surgical equipment
• Scrubbing surgical rooms
• Packing surgical instruments ready to be sterilized
• Wiping anything and everything with anti-bacterial liquid. You may not discover until after your week that this liquid was not meant for direct contact with your hands. This was a bit late for me, since I had been wrist deep all week, and my hands were still sore and red five weeks later.
• Cleaning the freezer where they put the dead animals before they are taken away
• Filling needles with IV fluid
• Your vet may spend his or her time telling you of the many reasons why you should not be a vet. Most of these are lies. They just don't want competition.
• And, if you're lucky, you might get to take the temperature of an animal, which, most likely, will have a severe case of diarrhea.

Things not to do:

• Never, ever laugh at the vet. Especially in the middle of an operation. Even when they just did something funny, like make blood go everywhere after they said that a good vet never has bloody surgery.
• When a dead cat falls out of a bag because someone picked it up the wrong way, do not laugh. Do not snigger. This is not considered funny.
• Do not expect to touch animals. Do not expect to even look at a whole animal all at once. Instead, you will get to watch many, many animals in surgery. If you faint on the first day, it's probably not worth going back the next. To be a good vet, you have to not mind seeing pieces of animal scattered around a table.
• Stabbing yourself with IV fluid is a bad idea. For starters,this reduces the amount of needles that are usable by one, secondly, you will need a band-aid, and also, you just wasted IV fluid. Tut, tut.
• Don't cut yourself with surgical scissors immediately after use in surgery. This is really bad.
• Do not trust the vet when he tries to trick you into thinking that Abyssinian cats are cats that only have three legs (it's actually a breed) and that, before technology people had to taste the urine to decide what was wrong with it. (I was smart enough to pick this out before he tried to make me give him an opinion.)
• Don't put two dogs in a cage together. This is considered very bad, even if a vet put them in there first.
• If said two dogs start to fight, do not touch them. Scream at them and make loud noises. Or call a vet.
• Cats are evil (if you don't believe me, during my stay at the vet hospital one vet went to hospital from a cat bite and the same cat got put down because it was too feral to touch), so do not go near a cat cage, unless the cat is post-op and won't notice you anyway.

You may notice that much of this is pre-occupied with death. Unfortunately, veterinary work is. I remember my father telling me of a vet who tried to kill himself with the same drug he euthanasized the animals with because he was so depressed over how many animals he had to put down. If you cannot cope with telling an owner that their dear pet has died, or is dying, don't be a vet. For your own sake.