A Different View with Dave O’Connell
The trials and tribulations of Cardiff City football club may have, for the most part, gone under the radar – but the Welsh club’s backstage drama had at least one notable achievement….it raised the bar for work experience placements the world over.
Because Vincent Tan, the eccentric owner of the Premiership club, decided to replace his head of recruitment with a 23 year old Kazakh friend of his son, a young man who was up to then on work experience, involving nothing more arduous than painting part of the stadium’s stand.
Perhaps Alisher Apsalyamov showed such potential in slapping the whitewash onto the walls that the next obvious step in his career was to put him in charge of spending millions of euro on international footballers – but it still qualifies as the most spectacular rise through the ranks since Monica Lewinsky in the Oval Office.
Transition Year students could learn a thing or two from Alisher – if only to recognise that painting and decorating the workplace, as opposed to playing Solitaire on the company computer, offers you the chance to live the dream.
Unfortunately most of them see work placements as an opportunity to catch up with their friends on Facebook and to make the relevant changes to their Fantasy Football team.
Our friend Alisher, on the other hand, now has his own Fantasy Football team where he can spend Uncle Vincent’s millions to make these changes for real.
And for those who live the FIFA 14 dream, this represents the ultimate chance to show that the team you put together over the internet would work in real life….and more successfully than the squad put together by someone who claimed it was actually his job.
Which is all very fine when it comes to FIFA – but you wouldn’t want that sort of thinking among gamers with a preference for Call of Duty or, even worse, Grand Theft Auto.
Imagine if they decided to put their new-found predilection for criminality to use for real and starting robbing banks and Ferraris and shooting people at will.
The other problem with Alisher’s rise through the ranks is that this also might lead to increased expectations for those currently considering a work placement, in that they might think – if they’re working in a sweet shop, for example – they can help themselves to the contents.
There are many positives to Transition Year – it can help a student mature, give them a sense of the world around them, and offer them a year out of having their Leaving Cert being drummed into them so that they’ve learned it off by heart.
But many businesses wouldn’t touch a Transition Year with a barge pole. This can be for any number of reasons, but mainly because they’re not a babysitting service and they have no great desire to do the work a teacher should be doing and for which they are paid whether they’ve signed up to the Haddington Road Agreement or not.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
