Project brings work experience to life through virtual reality

The EBP is a Lincolnshire based social enterprise with 20 years’ experience of working in the careers and education sector. We are a NatWest SE100 social enterprise supporting young people to enhance their long-term employability by developing skills to better prepare them for working life.
One of The EBP’s flagship services is the provision of work experience placements. Our work experience service provides opportunities for young people to understand the modern working environment and make informed decisions about their aspirations for working life. Over recent years we have placed in excess of 50,000 young people into a broad range of working environments.
There are, however, limitations to the traditional work experience model. Placements are not always accessible due to rurality, the lack of availability of relevant experiences and the health and safety implications connected with certain job roles which means that young people sometimes cannot participate fully in some activities whilst on site. In addition, the impact of the current pandemic creates additional challenges when sourcing meaningful placements for young people. Our alternative model, ‘Discover Reality’ provides a solution to all of these challenges and we now need the support of the business community to make this innovative and trailblazing solution a reality for 2021 and beyond!

Discover Reality – A new way of delivering work experience

Discover Reality will present a catalogue of work experience opportunities to young people using state of the art Virtual Reality headsets. For the first time we are able to provide accessible representation of any chosen career through this highly engaging, safe and inclusive delivery model. Through these experiences, young people will get a feel and understanding of what job roles entail and support them to make informed choices about their career pathways for future years.
Importantly Discover Reality offers the opportunity for many thousands of young people to understand your business and the job roles and employment opportunities that are available should they decide to pursue a career within your sector. Using this approach significantly more young people will benefit from this real world insight into your business/sector as opposed to the small number who you may ordinarily be able to accommodate using the more traditional work experience model.
Discover Reality has a direct line of sight to the aspirations of government to upskill our future workforce and address the skills gap by adopting more innovative and creative approaches to the way in which we engage our next generation of workers from a young age. Using Virtual Reality technology our Discover Reality model does just that. It embraces technology and puts the young person in the heart of your business through the use of the young person’s virtual reality headset - which will be provided by The EBP into all participating schools. For a short introductory video on the concept please visit https://youtu.be/4ZIpXSx3rys