PALS Society

Work Placement Projects

Training and Development

Our main offering for young people with autism or a learning difficulty is the establishment of training to help them develop the skills and a portfolio of achievements to make them work-ready.

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The main element of this development will be around a work placement project that aims to deliver a product or service to a real customer. The aims for our young people are:

• learning new technical skills with mentor support

• learning how to work for customers and when 'the customer is right'

• learning how to work in teams trying to achieve a common aim

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What are we looking for?

We would like to talk to businesses that might be able to sponsor a project for one or more of our beneficiaries.  We need to set up 16 of these in our first year, and 32 every year thereafter.  Sponsoring a project means being a customer for an IT product or service that you want delivered but don't have the resources or budget to develop yourselves.

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It might be a database application, a new website, a new server running virtual machines to lower your IT infrastructure costs, mobile or tablet applications, coding, web scraping, Network storage and secure backup.

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A typical project will last for 3 months with our student working roughly 50% of their time on the project.

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We also will have students who will be working with us for 12 months who can take on larger projects.

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We are happy to discuss requirements for larger projects that could be undertaken by a team of students.

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What is your commitment?

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We will need to spend some time upfront being clear about the project requirements and whether or not it can be delivered by our students.  We want each project to be a success!

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We will need someone in your organisation to act as a customer for the project who will accept the deliverable.  It would be useful to have a small group of interested people for whom progress can be reported and the project steered if necessary.

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All projects are provided free of charge.  We will ask at the end of the project for feedback both to the student and PALS Society.  This will be essential for our students portfolio of achievements and for our applications to the Education and Skills Funding Agency who fund our work placements.

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At the end of the project, delighted customers are welcome to provide a donation to PALS Society to ensure that we can continue to provide our services.

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