This is real work, posted by a real employer this morning. Write your answer before anyone teaches you how. What comes back is the lesson.
Inbox — Priya Raval <p.raval@…> — 06:52
Six days. Six days with no hot water and no heating, in February, with a nine-month-old in the flat.
Your engineer was booked for Tuesday and didn't come. Booked again for Thursday and didn't come. I took Thursday off unpaid to sit in an empty flat waiting for him. That's £94 I don't have.
Nobody has called me. I've called you eleven times. I'm done being polite about this — either someone fixes it tomorrow or I'm going to the ombudsman and I'm putting all of this online.
The job
Write the reply that goes out under your name. She needs to feel heard and know exactly what happens next. 100–200 words. You can't promise an engineer tomorrow — the earliest slot is Friday 08:00–12:00.
You just did the thing employability programmes make you wait eleven weeks for. Everything below explains why it works in that order.
You know the trap. No experience, so no job. No job, so no experience. Every scheme built to fix it starts with a lecture and ends with a certificate nobody asked for — a piece of paper that proves you sat still, not that you can do the work.
So we run the sequence the other way. The employer's task comes first. Your attempt comes second. The feedback on your attempt is the teaching — specific to what you actually wrote, not a generic module. And the finished job stays on your record with the employer's name on it.
The job supplies the experience. That's the whole trick.
Same five steps. Reverse the arrows.
The standard order. Four steps of preparation, then the door shuts on step five — because nothing you did in steps one to three counts as work.
Every task on this board came from a business with the problem in front of them. Small pieces — an hour, maybe two. Some are paid. All of them count.
Digital literacy isn't knowing where the buttons are. It's spotting the cell that will make a funding report wrong six weeks from now.
The job
Our funder wants total volunteer hours by month. I'm about to paste this into the report. Click every cell that would make that total wrong. Don't fix anything yet — just find them.
| Volunteer | Date | Site | Hours | Expenses |
|---|
There's no correct answer to this one. There's only what you chose to protect and what you let drop — and being able to say which is the skill.
The job
You're supervising. It's 07:40. The café opens at 08:00.
What do you do first?
Not to gate you — to make them land. A lesson on de-escalation is abstract until you've written your own reply and seen where it went wrong. Attempt the task, and the courses your feedback pointed at open up, with your own words used as the example throughout.
Not a certificate. A list of real jobs from named businesses, what you were asked to do, and how the finished attempt went. Only work an employer has verified appears here — the drafts underneath stay between you and the marker. Who sees what, exactly →
Nothing on it yet.
That's not a judgement, it's just the beginning. Do any task above and it lands here — reference number, employer, date, and what you demonstrated. Start with the tenant.
A record with three entries on it is enough to apply with. This is where we point it at jobs that will actually take you.
🍔 The jobs that will let you in
If you're still at school, service and retail are the best doors to push on. They ask for almost no experience up front, and the things they teach you — talking to strangers, holding it together when it's busy, solving something on the spot — are exactly what every job after this one wants.
Usually flexible scheduling and stable hourly pay, with staff meals and discounts on top. It's genuinely interesting work and you learn the products properly. Some stores require you to be 18 — it varies branch to branch, so ask rather than assume.
Stocking shelves, working the till, helping customers find things. A relatively relaxed environment and a good first shift pattern to learn on.
Quiet, and you can read on the job. Worth knowing that these roles usually do ask for 18+.
Clothing, phones, sports, homeware — the floor job is the same shape everywhere: greet people, find things, tidy, work the till. Weekends and holidays are when they need bodies most, which suits school hours exactly. You learn to read what someone wants before they've finished the sentence, and that skill transfers to every job you'll ever have.
Often your first paid work, and usually it starts with neighbours and family friends rather than an application form. The pay is decent for the hours and you can do it around school. Employers take it seriously too — being trusted alone with someone's children is a real reference.
Get a paediatric first aid certificate if you can; it costs little, takes a day, and it's the thing parents ask about. Agree the hours, the rate and who's collecting you before the first evening, and always tell someone at home the address you're going to.
The most flexible of the lot. You're working for yourself, so you set the rate and the round, and one satisfied neighbour tends to produce three more. Physical, outdoors, and nobody is standing over you.
Because you're self-employed, the admin is on you: keep a simple record of what you earned and check whether you need to tell HMRC. If you're walking dogs, ask about insurance — some owners expect it, and it's cheap.
Optional on purpose. Some employers form a view from a photo before they read a word, so leaving it blank is a legitimate choice and never counts against you here.
Every one of these is a normal answer. The last one is the reason this platform exists.
What kind of work are you interested in?
Pick as many as you'd actually take. Employers only see the ones you choose.
Not sure what goes in it? Read how to write a resume with no experience →
Part-time or full-time?
Minimum wage is set by age and changes each April — check the current rate for yours on gov.uk before you put a number down. Ask for the rate, not less than it.
Ten minutes to write a brief, ten to give feedback. You get the work back, and someone gets the first line on a record that finally has something on it. You are not doing charity — you're getting a spreadsheet cleaned.
Three fields. That's the whole form.
No work experience doesn't mean no resume. It means the resume has a different job to do: instead of proving what you've already been paid for, it shows HR what you're capable of. Four things carry that weight.
Your name, contact details, and the school you attend. Keep it plain and keep it findable — a phone number and an email address you actually check, at the top, in ordinary size text. This is not the place to be creative.
Use an email address you'd be happy reading aloud in an interview.
State your high school clearly and give your expected graduation date. "Expected" is a normal, professional word — nobody is confused by a date in the future, and leaving it off is what causes questions.
Subjects and predicted grades go here too if they're relevant to the job.
Class activities, club experiences and volunteer services all belong on a resume. Focus on the role you played and the skills you took from it — communication, teamwork, organising other people — rather than just naming the activity.
"Ran the sign-up sheet for a 40-person charity walk" beats "member of charity club" every time.
Being proficient in a particular piece of software, skilled at photography, or deeply into one specific field all count and all belong here. Genuine hobbies are worth including — an interesting one gives the interviewer something to open with and leaves an impression long after the rest of the page has blurred.
Be honest about levels. "Confident in Excel" and "expert in Excel" get asked very different follow-up questions.
Amara Okafor
07700 900 118 · amara.okafor@email.com · Salford
Kersal High School
Education
Kersal High School — expected to graduate June 2027
Predicted: English 7, Maths 6, Business Studies 7
Activities and volunteering
Treasurer, Year 11 Charity Committee — 2025 to now
Tracked £1,400 across four events in a shared spreadsheet and reported the totals to staff each half-term. Learned to chase people for information politely and repeatedly.
Volunteer, Riverside Youth Trust — 40 hours
Ran the front desk on Saturday mornings, signing in up to 30 children and handling parents' questions on my own.
Skills and interests
Excel — confident with formulas, sorting and pivot tables. Canva. Conversational Igbo.
Film photography; I develop my own black and white at home, which has made me patient about getting things right first time.
Hover or tap a section on the left to see where it lands on the page. Not one line of this is a paid job.
One page. Always one page.
Nobody with no work history needs two, and a padded resume reads as padding. If it's spilling over, the fix is cutting adjectives, not shrinking the font.
After you've accumulated some experience and skills, and you know what different jobs actually feel like from the inside, you stop waiting for postings and start going directly at people. Three routes out. They suit different people — read all three, then pick the one that matches where you're pointed.
Suits: students aiming at business, marketing, media or public-sector and charity work.
📌 Keywords: small businessesstartupslocal organisations
A high-school junior approached a small design company in Richmond directly. She ended up managing their social media accounts, interned for four months, and left with it on her activity list plus a recommendation letter.
Suits: students aiming at research, medicine, psychology or sociology.
📌 Keywords: high school research assistantlab outreach
This is not about writing papers or getting published. It's helping with literature reviews, processing questionnaires and entering data — real, needed work that suits a high-school student well. Say that's what you're offering and you'll be taken far more seriously than if you ask to co-author something.
Suits: students interested in education, social welfare and cross-cultural exchange.
📌 Channels: local librariesconstituency officescultural institutions
Students have worked as youth guides at museums and planned children's programmes at church summer camps. Experience like this demonstrates responsibility and communication skills — and unlike a certificate, someone was relying on you, which is what makes it worth talking about.
All three routes need the same thing from you: a short email to a stranger.
That's not a personality trait, it's a skill, and it's on the board. Asking for what you need at work is the course that covers it, and it opens once you've attempted a task.
Free to learn, free to attempt tasks, free to keep your record and show it to anyone. Not free-for-now, not free-until-you-hit-a-limit, not a trial. If you never pay us anything, you still get all of it.
There are no shareholders waiting to be paid, so there's no point in the future where the free thing has to start costing money. That's not a promise about our good intentions — it's a structural fact about how the organisation is set up, and it's the only kind of promise worth trusting.
Employers. When a business uses the platform to find and hire someone, they pay a fee. That's the entire model. Young people are the reason this exists; employers are the ones who pay for it.
The rule underneath all of this: the side with money pays, the side looking for work never does. Any platform that reverses that is worth walking away from.
Written and tested properly rather than scraped together — which costs real money, and is the difference between a course that changes how you write an email and one you click through to get a badge.
Most businesses have never written a task brief. We sit with them and help, because a vague brief wastes your afternoon and teaches you nothing.
Feedback is the lesson here, so it has to be good. We train and support the people writing it, and we review it. That support is the single most expensive thing we do and the most important.
Things we don't do
Some tasks on the board are paid.
That money goes from the employer straight to you, in full. We don't touch it. See what's paid on the board →
If anyone ever asks you for money to get a job, that is the warning sign.
Not just here — anywhere. Legitimate employers and agencies in the UK don't charge you to find you work. If a "recruiter" wants a fee, a deposit, or payment for training before you start, stop and tell someone you trust.
Short version: the AI marker sees them. Employers don't — not until you've revised, submitted, and the employer has verified that this is the version they wanted. Only then does anything become visible on your record.
Nobody is watching you be bad at something.
The whole method depends on you attempting work before you've been taught it, which means your first go is supposed to be rough. That only works if a rough first go is safe. So it is.
Read down the left for what's happening, across the top for who's looking.
| Stage | You | AI marker | Employer | Your record |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. You write your first attemptStraight after reading the brief, before any lesson. | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 2. Feedback comes backThe AI marker reads your attempt against the employer's own rubric and tells you what to move. This is the lesson. | Yes | Yes | No | No |
| 3. You revise and submit for verificationAs many drafts in between as you like. You choose which version goes forward. | Yes | Yes | Only the version you sent | Not yet |
| 4. The employer verifies itThey confirm this is the version they wanted submitted. | Yes | Yes | Yes | Verified version only |
Everything in stages 1 and 2 stays between you and the marker permanently. Reaching stage 3 is your decision and nobody else's.
It's software reading your work against criteria the employer wrote. It's fast, it's available at eleven at night, and it will never sigh at you. It is also not a person, and it can be wrong — if feedback looks wrong to you, say so, and a human reads it.
Because a record full of first drafts isn't evidence, it's noise. What earns you the interview is finished work that the business itself has confirmed was the version they wanted — their name against it, on purpose. That's a far stronger claim than "attempted 40 tasks", and it's only possible because the drafts underneath stayed private.
Any attempt, at any stage, including verified ones already on your record. It goes, and it doesn't leave a gap or a note saying something was removed. Your record is yours.
One thing worth being clear about.
Once you send an attempt for verification at stage 3, the employer has read it. We can remove it from your record but we can't unsee it for them. So stage 3 is the moment to be sure — everything before it is genuinely reversible.
Write it the way you'd explain it to a new starter standing next to you. Plain words beat a job spec — the whole point is that someone can read this and begin.
How it lands on the board
Fill the three fields and post it to see the card a learner will read.
Field 2 is the one that matters.
It becomes the rubric a learner's attempt is marked against, so write what you'd actually notice — not what sounds professional. "No hiding behind policy" is a better criterion than "strong communication skills."
You don't have to pay for a task.
Add a fee if you want to and it goes to the learner in full. Plenty of good briefs are unpaid — what you're really committing to is ten minutes of honest feedback. How the money works →