Yesterday morning was different from the outset.
I was back at my old school for breakfast with a small group of past pupils and parents of current pupils listening to plans for a new building dedicated to science, technology, engineering, arts and maths.
The people behind the project have done their homework. They’ve visited campuses abroad, studied what works.
One aspect that stood out for me was a deliberate decision to place art and science side by side. Not as separate streams, but as complementary forces. Precision and play. Logic and imagination. Technology and creativity.
Today, and looking forward, that feels particularly important.
The building it will replace was new when I started there. It’s now close to forty years old. I’ll say no more.
Even just considering it through Nico’s lens made the whole experience more curious. Not hopeful or nostalgic. Just curious about the kind of world he’ll step into.
Later that morning I walked into a client’s office and randomly bumped into my friends’ son who attends the same school I went to, the very place I had just left. The firm is hosting transition year students he told me, he was on work experience.
As I was shown to a meeting room, I chatted with one of the hospitality team about our own transition year work experience.
His had been in a mechanic’s garage. He loved coming home filthy from football training, he said. But he didn’t love scrubbing oil off his hands every evening that week. It wasn’t for him.
I told him about mine in the Four Courts in the early-mid 90’s. I’d imagined drama and courtroom theatre you’d see on TV like LA Law. What I got was a cold building and a morning of parking fine cases.
It was deeply useful.
It pointed me away from something that, in my head, had seemed different.
We tend to frame work experience as finding what you love. Often it’s about discovering what you don’t.
And maybe it shouldn’t stop at transition year.
The world is moving too quickly for that.
What if we treated parts of our current roles as work experience? Experiments. Short placements in unfamiliar territory. Chances to test, rule out, recalibrate.
The more experimental we can be, the more open we are to learning, the faster we adapt.
Wouldn’t that be helpful right now?