本文摘要：When Nick Simmons’s teenage son came home from school with a request to provide work experience to a classmate, he came up with a cunning response that inspired the website he has just launched.尼克西蒙斯(Nick Simmons，见上图)十几岁的儿子放学回家时向他明确提出了一个拒绝：给他的一位女同学去找进修工作。

When Nick Simmons’s teenage son came home from school with a request to provide work experience to a classmate, he came up with a cunning response that inspired the website he has just launched.尼克西蒙斯(Nick Simmons，见上图)十几岁的儿子放学回家时向他明确提出了一个拒绝：给他的一位女同学去找进修工作。回应，西蒙斯想到了一个精妙的应付，并且由此产生启发，在不久前创立了一个网站。“I rolled my eyes and agreed, but on one condition,” he recalls. “My son needed a placement too, and when I learnt what her father did, I emailed politely and asked if he would be interested in reciprocating. We ended up creating two internships that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.”“我想要了想要表示同意了，但有一个条件，”他回想道，“我儿子也必须一份进修工作，当我理解他同学的父亲做到什么工作后，我礼貌地给这位父亲放了一封电邮，回答他否有兴趣为我的儿子去找一份进修工作。

我们最后建构了两个原本会不存在的实习生岗位。”Neither placement was typical nor easy to find in a school dominated by parents who were bankers and lawyers. Mr Simmons offered the schoolgirl an insight into his work as a graphic designer, while his son spent a week with the head of an international policy think-tank.在这所父母大多为银行家和律师的学校里，这两份进修工作并不少见，去找一起也不更容易。西蒙斯为那位女生获取了理解他平面设计师工作的机会，他的儿子则在一家国际政策智库的负责人手下工作了一周时间。Like most people of his generation, Mr Simmons’s own teenage work experience amounted to little more than some weekends working in a pub for money. But today, he recognises the pressures parents and their children are under to understand more and earlier in life about the world after education.与他这代人的多数人一样，西蒙斯十几岁时候的工作经验只不过是周末在酒吧工作赚。

但如今，他意识到父母和子女都面对压力，要更好早地理解毕业后的世界。“It’s a given now for schools, on university applications and for jobs,” he says. “All the statistics are out there. Employers say that work experience is almost more important than the grade they achieved in their exams.”“现在这是上学、申请人大学和去找工作所必须的，”他回应，“所有数据都明明白白。

企业回应，工作经验完全比他们在考试中获得的分数还要最重要。”He trawled the web to see whether there were any useful sites to help find placements, but found few had many postings and most were “pseudo employment agencies” targeting people already in their 20s to offer internships as a cheap alternative to hiring staff full-time.他在网上希望搜索了一番，想到否有简单的网站可以协助寻找进修工作，但他找到公布很多职位信息的网站很少，多数是“冒充的职业介绍所”，针对的是早已20多岁的年轻人，向他们获取廉价的进修岗位，以代替聘请全职员工。

Over the past four years, he instead developed in his spare time MyInternSwap.com, his own online service, using his design expertise and paying coders to write the software needed for messaging, database management and security.于是，过去4年，他利用闲暇时间研发了他的在线服务网站MyInternSwap.com，充分发挥他的设计专长，并收费给程序员撰写信息公布、数据库管理以及安全性所需的软件。The closest model he found was dating sites. But he is using the same principle of matchmaking for a very different purpose. His vision is to encourage and facilitate family-to-family swaps, primarily with a social purpose: to create opportunities and avoid the awkwardness of children spending time at their own parents’ workplaces.他寻找的最相似的模式是交友网站。但他在利用完全相同的筛选原则构建有所不同的目的。他的设想是希望和便利家庭与家庭之间互相交换进修工作，主要是带着一个社会目的：建构机会，同时防止孩子们在自己父母工作的地方进修的失望。

“There are no openly offered work experience slots,” he says. “Who would want to take it on unless they were coerced by family or friends? We can generate them.” Listing and search — which can be done by location and job category — will be free, although he plans to charge an annual membership fee of 24 to cover development and marketing costs.“现在没公开发表获取的进修机会，”他回应，“除非家人或朋友强制，否则谁不愿拒绝接受这种工作？我们可以建构这样的机会。”注册和搜寻（可以根据地点和工作种类搜寻）将是免费的，不过他计划向会员缴纳24英镑的年费，以填补研发和营销成本。

During a pilot phase recently, he signed up nearly 500 placements, with each school student seeking work experience required to offer one in exchange with parents or close family or friends. Given the cosmopolitan nature of London, where the pilot was promoted, the postings span 17 countries.在最近的试运营阶段，他签下了近500个进修岗位，每个企图找寻进修机会的学生都必须由他们的家长、近亲或朋友获取一份工作来互相交换。鉴于伦敦（试运营发售的地方）的大都市特点，该网站获取的职位遍布17个国家。Not everyone is convinced that the initiative will make work experience easier and fairer. “It troubles me,” says Tony Watts, a veteran careers adviser and academic. “I can see its attraction at an individual level but it provides a further reinforcement of the ways in which current pressures for internships foster elitism and privilege, and inhibit social mobility and social justice.”并非所有人都坚信，这项计划不会让进修显得更加更容易和更加公平。

“这让我担忧，”资深职业顾问、学者托尼瓦茨(Tony Watts)回应，“从个人角度来看它极具吸引力，但它更进一步增强了当前去找进修工作的压力促成的精英主义和特权，而且不会妨碍社会流动和社会公平。”Mr Simmons counters that alongside more conventional and professional jobs in finance, law and marketing, MyInternSwap includes offers in yoga, farming and a fish-and-chip shop. He also has plans for an “orphan scheme” that would allow larger employers to offer placements as matches for those seeking work experience whose parents cannot provide reciprocal slots.西蒙斯驳斥称之为，除了金融、法律和营销领域等更加传统和专业的工作，MyInternSwap还获取瑜伽、农业和炸鱼薯条店的工作。

他还计划发售一个“孤儿计划”，让规模较小的企业为那些期望找寻进修机会、但他们的父母无法获取互相交换进修岗位的人获取进修机会。Tristram Hooley, professor of career education at the University of Derby in the UK, says: “New technologies can loosen and extend networks to a wider group of people but...there is clearly a risk this will only permit access to the relatively privileged. With any app the biggest challenge is to get it used at all.”英国德比大学(University of Derby)职业教育教授特里斯特拉姆胡利(Tristram Hooley)回应：“新技术需要为更加多人对外开放并不断扩大网络但……似乎这有可能只不会向比较有特权的阶层对外开放。任何一款应用于仅次于的挑战是确实让人用一起。

”Practicality and equity aside, the website offers at least some hope to create more transparency and opportunities in a world that remains obscure to most teenagers.把实用性和公平敲一旁，该网站最少不会给一些人带给期望：在这个多数青少年仍很懵懂的世界，它可以获取更加多透明度和机会。

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