When Nick Simmons’s teenage son came home from school with a request to provide work experience to a classmate, he came up with a cunning response that inspired the website he has just launched.

尼克•西蒙斯(Nick Simmons，见上图)十几岁的儿子放学回家时向他提出了一个要求：给他的一位女同学找实习工作。对此，西蒙斯想出了一个巧妙的应对，并且由此产生灵感，在不久前创建了一个网站。

“I rolled my eyes and agreed, but on one condition,” he recalls. “My son needed a placement too, and when I learnt what her father did, I emailed politely and asked if he would be interested in reciprocating¹. We ended up creating two internships that otherwise wouldn’t have existed.”

“我想了想同意了，但有一个条件，”他回忆道，“我儿子也需要一份实习工作，当我了解他同学的父亲做什么工作后，我礼貌地给这位父亲发了一封电邮，问他是否有兴趣为我的儿子找一份实习工作。我们最终创造了两个原本不会存在的实习生岗位。”

Neither placement was typical nor easy to find in a school dominated by parents who were bankers and lawyers. Mr Simmons offered the schoolgirl an insight into his work as a graphic² designer, while his son spent a week with the head of an international policy think-tank.

在这所父母大多为银行家和律师的学校里，这两份实习工作并不常见，找起来也不容易。西蒙斯为那位女生提供了了解他平面设计师工作的机会，他的儿子则在一家国际政策智库的负责人手下工作了一周时间。

Like most people of his generation, Mr Simmons’s own teenage work experience amounted to little more than some weekends working in a pub for money. But today, he recognises the pressures parents and their children are under to understand more and earlier in life about the world after education.

与他这代人的多数人一样，西蒙斯十几岁时候的工作经验只不过是周末在酒吧工作赚钱。但如今，他意识到父母和子女都面临压力，要更多更早地了解毕业后的世界。

“It’s a given now for schools, on university applications and for jobs,” he says. “All the statistics are out there. Employers say that work experience is almost more important than the grade they achieved in their exams.”

“现在这是上学、申请大学和找工作所必需的，”他表示，“所有数据都明明白白。企业表示，工作经验几乎比他们在考试中得到的分数还要重要。”

He trawled the web to see whether there were any useful sites to help find placements, but found few had many postings and most were “pseudo employment agencies” targeting people already in their 20s to offer internships as a cheap alternative to hiring staff full-time³.

他在网上努力搜寻了一番，看看是否有有用的网站可以帮助找到实习工作，但他发现发布很多职位信息的网站很少，多数是“假冒的职业介绍所”，针对的是已经20多岁的年轻人，向他们提供廉价的实习岗位，以取代聘用全职员工。

Over the past four years, he instead developed in his spare time MyInternSwap.com, his own online service, using his design expertise⁴ and paying coders to write the software needed for messaging, database management and security.

于是，过去4年，他利用闲暇时间开发了他的在线服务网站MyInternSwap.com，发挥他的设计专长，并付费给程序员编写信息发布、数据库管理以及安全所需的软件。

The closest model he found was dating sites. But he is using the same principle of matchmaking for a very different purpose. His vision is to encourage and facilitate family-to-family swaps⁵, primarily with a social purpose: to create opportunities and avoid the awkwardness of children spending time at their own parents’ workplaces.

他找到的最接近的模式是交友网站。但他在利用相同的配对原则实现不同的目的。他的设想是鼓励和方便家庭与家庭之间交换实习工作，主要是带着一个社会目的：创造机会，同时避免孩子们在自己父母工作的地方实习的尴尬。

“There are no openly offered work experience slots,” he says. “Who would want to take it on unless they were coerced⁶ by family or friends? We can generate them.” Listing and search — which can be done by location and job category — will be free, although he plans to charge an annual membership fee of £24 to cover development and marketing⁷ costs.

“现在没有公开提供的实习机会，”他表示，“除非家人或朋友强迫，否则谁愿意接受这种工作？我们可以创造这样的机会。”登记和搜索（可以根据地点和工作种类搜索）将是免费的，不过他计划向会员收取24英镑的年费，以弥补开发和营销成本。

During a pilot phase recently, he signed up nearly 500 placements, with each school student seeking work experience required to offer one in exchange with parents or close family or friends. Given the cosmopolitan⁸ nature of London, where the pilot was promoted, the postings span 17 countries.

在最近的试运营阶段，他签约了近500个实习岗位，每个试图寻找实习机会的学生都需要由他们的家长、近亲或朋友提供一份工作来交换。鉴于伦敦（试运营推出的地方）的大都市特点，该网站提供的职位遍及17个国家。

Not everyone is convinced that the initiative will make work experience easier and fairer. “It troubles me,” says Tony Watts⁹, a veteran careers adviser¹⁰ and academic. “I can see its attraction at an individual level but it provides a further reinforcement of the ways in which current pressures for internships foster elitism¹¹ and privilege, and inhibit¹² social mobility¹³ and social justice.”

并非所有人都相信，这项计划会让实习变得更为容易和更为公平。“这让我担心，”资深职业顾问、学者托尼•瓦茨(Tony Watts)表示，“从个人角度来看它颇具吸引力，但它进一步强化了当前找实习工作的压力催生的精英主义和特权，而且会阻碍社会流动和社会公平。”

Mr Simmons counters that alongside more conventional and professional jobs in finance, law and marketing, MyInternSwap includes offers in yoga, farming and a fish-and-chip shop. He also has plans for an “orphan¹⁴ scheme” that would allow larger employers to offer placements as matches for those seeking work experience whose parents cannot provide reciprocal slots.

西蒙斯反驳称，除了金融、法律和营销领域等更传统和专业的工作，MyInternSwap还提供瑜伽、农业和炸鱼薯条店的工作。他还计划推出一个“孤儿计划”，让规模较大的企业为那些希望寻找实习机会、但他们的父母无法提供交换实习岗位的人提供实习机会。

Tristram Hooley, professor of career education at the University of Derby in the UK, says: “New technologies can loosen and extend networks to a wider group of people but . . . there is clearly a risk this will only permit access to the relatively¹⁵ privileged. With any app the biggest challenge is to get it used at all.”

英国德比大学(University of Derby)职业教育教授特里斯特拉姆•胡利(Tristram Hooley)表示：“新技术能够为更多人开放并扩大网络但……显然这可能只会向相对有特权的阶层开放。任何一款应用最大的挑战是真正让人用起来。”

Practicality and equity¹⁶ aside, the website offers at least some hope to create more transparency and opportunities in a world that remains¹⁷ obscure to most teenagers.

把实用性和平等放一边，该网站至少会给一些人带来希望：在这个多数青少年仍很懵懂的世界，它可以提供更多透明度和机会。