For young people in rural communities, employment opportunities can be hard to find. Understanding the importance of decency and value of doing the right thing, we take pride in offering young people in our communities the chance to gain their first experiences of the workplace.
Over the next ten years, we will take on 250 trainees, apprentices and paid graduates, and enable 250 pre-GCSE work experience placements. We will work with local education and training providers to create these opportunities to benefit young people.
The types of opportunities we currently offer include:
- Work experience - short placements for school children aged 14 and 15 to shadow members of staff in their roles. Due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic, we were sadly unable to facilitate any work experience placements in 2020.
However, we are making full use of the Government’s Kickstart scheme, which funds 6-month long work experience placements for young people threatened with the prospect of long-term unemployment. In return, employers like us provide training and support to equip the candidates for future employment. So far, we have recruited a dozen candidates across departments at Chatsworth and are offering a further 14 placements in our hotels. The young people we have welcomed have all shown a positive attitude to working with us and have settled in to their teams well. - Apprenticeships - paid roles in which the apprentice develops an industry-specific skillset. In 2020, there were 7 apprentices within the organisation.
We also provide placements and projects for students in Higher Education, such as:
- Undergraduates - placements for students undertaking degrees in a wide range of fields. Departments hosting undergraduate placements in 2020 included the Chatsworth building department, forestry and land agents teams. In 2020, an intern joined the Archives and Library team for the summer. Working entirely from home, they compiled a bibliography of publications about Chatsworth and the Cavendish family, which has been published on our website.
- Graduates - fixed term roles held by recent graduates, benefitting both the employer and the participant. In 2020, there were graduate roles in farming, finance and IT.
- PhD students - postgraduate doctoral level projects supervised by staff in the Collections department. In collaboration with the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities, two PhD students joined us in 2019: one of them is researching the history of Chatsworth's Theatre; the other is looking at the history of our archives - specifically the role of women in creating and curating Chatsworth's collections.
