OPINION: Every Swedish student completes at least 10 days of workplace experience.
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Giving teenagers work experience could help more of them get their first job. Photo / Getty Images
Travelling through Sweden over the past week, one thing has struck me more than anything else.
It’s not the beautiful coastline, the forests or the long summer evenings when the sun barely sets. It’s the number of young people working.
Whether we’ve stopped for coffee in a tiny fishing
village, visited a museum, checked into a hotel, wandered through a supermarket or sat down for dinner, we’ve been served by teenagers.
They’re making coffees, taking orders, stacking shelves, scooping ice cream, clearing tables and helping tourists. Some look like it’s their first week. Others already have the quiet confidence that comes from dealing with people every day.
What makes this striking is not just the number of young people working, but how normal it feels.
In Sweden, work does not suddenly begin at 18. Young people are introduced to it gradually. They see it, experience it and learn from it while they are still at school.
After a while, I realised why it stood out: it feels much more common than it does in New Zealand. Perhaps I noticed because it reminded me of my own teenage years.
Growing up in Stockholm before moving to New Zealand as a young adult, I completed PRAO, like almost every Swedish teenager. PRAO stands for praktisk arbetslivsorientering, or practical orientation to working life.
Today, every Swedish student completes at least 10 days of PRAO across both Years 8 and 9. Schools partner with employers to organise placements, although families can also suggest workplaces if they have connections.
This is not a careers day or an hour spent shadowing someone. Students spend meaningful time in a real workplace, supported by a supervisor who helps them understand how the organisation operates and gives them opportunities to contribute in age-appropriate ways.
The placements are incredibly varied. One student might spend time in a supermarket, another in a hotel, construction company, childcare centre, cafe, engineering firm, technology business, council or healthcare provider.
The objective isn’t to ask a 14-year-old to choose a career. It’s to make work familiar.
To show young people what good workplaces look like. To teach them how teams function. To help them understand responsibility, punctuality, communication and customer service. To build confidence before they ever apply for their first job.
I completed one of my PRAO placements at Telia, Sweden’s telecommunications company and the equivalent of Spark.
I’d been to work with my parents before, so workplaces weren’t unfamiliar to me, but this felt different. For the first time, I wasn’t there as someone’s daughter. I was there because I was expected to learn, contribute and be part of the team.
I remember sitting in meetings, watching people solve problems together and being trusted to help where I could. It made work feel less like somewhere adults disappeared to every day and more like somewhere I could imagine belonging myself.
Not long afterwards, I spent part of my summer stacking shelves at our local supermarket. I got that job because of a reference from Telia, and it later turned into a permanent weekend job across the school year.
Neither experience changed my life overnight. Neither was glamorous. But looking back, they taught me lessons that stayed with me far longer than I realised.
By the time I entered the workforce properly, I already understood what it meant to arrive on time, ask questions, work alongside people of different ages and appreciate that every job, no matter how ordinary it seemed, mattered to someone.
As we’ve travelled through Sweden with our own children, I’ve found myself wondering why this culture feels so different from what I see in New Zealand.
This week, over dinner with friends who are now raising teenagers here, PRAO came up in conversation. Every one of them spoke positively about it. Interestingly, none of them talked about their children discovering their dream career.
Instead, they talked about confidence, responsibility and relationships. One friend’s daughter finished her placement and was offered weekend work.
Another’s son stayed in touch with his employer and returned during the school holidays. Others spoke about mentors, references and opportunities that would not have existed if their children had not first been welcomed into those workplaces.
Again and again I heard the same message. PRAO isn’t really about the placement itself. It’s about everything that follows. It gives young people their first workplace relationship, their first referee, their first mentor and, often, their first employer.
It also benefits employers.
Businesses get to meet young people before they’ve written a CV. They see attitude before experience, curiosity before qualifications, and reliability before a formal interview.
For many employers, it becomes a natural pathway into weekend work, summer jobs, apprenticeships and eventually fulltime employment.
As New Zealand debates productivity, skills shortages, school attendance and youth employment, this feels like an idea whose time has come. We often search for complicated solutions to difficult problems. This one is remarkably simple.
Every secondary school student should have the opportunity to spend meaningful time inside a real workplace before they leave school. Not as an optional programme.
Not only for students whose parents have professional networks. Not only for high achievers. For everyone. Because one of the biggest inequalities young people face is not talent. It’s access.
Some teenagers grow up surrounded by adults who can organise work experience, make introductions and explain how workplaces operate. Others don’t. A national programme helps level that playing field.
The beauty of PRAO is that it does not ask the Government to create jobs. It simply creates opportunities for young people to experience work before they need it. That experience builds confidence, connections and capability in ways classrooms alone cannot.
With New Zealand heading towards another election, this feels like exactly the sort of practical, bipartisan policy we should be discussing. It is proven. It is affordable.
It would strengthen the relationship between schools, employers and local communities. Most importantly, it would help prepare young New Zealanders for adulthood not through theory, but through experience.
If we want more young people to feel confident entering the workforce, we need to stop treating work as something that begins only after education finishes.
Instead, we should help them grow into it gradually, with the support of schools, employers and communities willing to invest a small amount of time in the next generation.
And as employers, we should be prepared to lead the way. At Tend, we would put up our hand to be part of this. We would welcome the opportunity to open our doors, show young people what modern healthcare looks like and help inspire the next generation of healthcare workers.
Sweden reminded me that preparing young people for adulthood does not have to be complicated. Sometimes it starts with something as simple as opening the door to a workplace and saying, “Come in. We’d like to show you how this works.”
It is an idea New Zealand should take seriously.
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