Work placement is a key element of most transition year programmes and is often remembered by students as one of the highlights of their ‘TY’ year, yet sourcing the placement is often left up to the student themselves.  ICT companies typically see fewer work placement applications from young female students that their male counterparts.  This initiative aims to facilitate equal opportunity work placements.

Three young ladies from St. Angela's College, St Patrick's Hill, Cork spent their week with the leading internal communications software company Newsweaver. 

Newsweaver helps Internal Communicators to create and send better employee emails that are visually impactful, with content that is more personalised, relevant and interactive, thereby getting employees to read more; and its analytics provides communicators with powerful insights to improve results, deliver better outcomes and prove value to organisation.

With offices in Ireland & the US they are the trusted partner to many of the world's leading organisations, including the FTSE 100 and Fortune 1000 companies.

As part of their work experience, each pupil set up their own blog and were introduced to and tried basic coding. They were also introduced to a number of key women within the organisation including Senior Sales, Technical Service Analyst, Sales Operations Manager, Team Lead Customer Service, Operations Manager.  They also spent time with Andrew O'Shaughnessy, CEO. 

Other companies in Cork, including Dell, ePubDirect, VMWare and EMC, have embraced the Smarter Placements scheme with similar initiatives.

For additional information on Smarter Placements, Contact: Sarah@itcork.ie