Your boss is away on holiday, your clients are away on holiday and soon you’ll be away on holiday, too. Heaven. Or it would be, if it wasn’t for that other hallmark of the office summer: work experience.

I was going to begin by identifying the most irritating type of student on “placement”, but to do so is like trying to distinguish between types of foot fungus: they’re all exasperating. The beneficiaries of nepotism, who arrive wearing outsized suits and looking like mini versions of the chief executive, annoy because they make us feel spied upon. The enthusiastic ones trying to seize the initiative in various memorable ways annoy because they get in the way and make us feel jaded. And then there are the ones who surf inappropriate websites, expose inappropriate amounts of stomach/bum, try to flirt with everything up to and including the fax machine, tell you you look like Noddy, and repeatedly mispronounce your name as “Shatman”.

Having said that, there may be one kind of work experience marginally more infuriating than any other: the visibly disappointed variety, who, lacking the verbal skills to complain in actual words, make their disappointment felt through a combination of sighs, eye rolling and botched tea orders. Because of the unarticulated nature of their whining, it’s difficult to tackle them, but an enterprising journalist on the Evening Standard did recently manage, presumably through a series of emotion-strewn messages on myface or spacebook, to get a few of them to string some sentences together. Here is an excerpt from a 19-year-old talking about her placement in a local government office: “As soon as I walked in the door on my first day someone asked me to make coffee, and it was downhill from then on. I wasn’t shown around and it wasn’t until the third day that I discovered where the toilet was . . . One whole day was spent screwing promotional pens together . . . I learnt nothing at all, except perhaps that local party politics is very boring.”

A number of questions spring to mind on reading this, the first of which being: how do you get through an entire working day without visiting the loo? Also: why does she think that learning you don’t like something equates to learning nothing? I would say that having your career hopes and dreams shattered was quite an education. The experience may have saved her decades of unhappiness. Meanwhile, what’s with the implication that real work and mundane tasks are mutually exclusive? Even the most thrilling jobs require the performance of banal acts. Dealing with crashed PCs and spelling out my name accounts for 80 per cent of what I do.

Of course, the bigger issue behind such complaints is the question of whether work experience actually works. By the sound of things, the current system makes everyone, to employ the language our passive aggressive teenage friends, feel :-( Too many employees feel lumbered with useless lumps, and too many students spend their placements being passed around the office, disowned by successive adult employees like a fart in an elevator. Is it time we gave up on it?

My instinctive response, especially having just listened to a consultant friend describe a meeting where a work experience student ran out crying after five minutes (“I don’t – sob – understand – whimper – what’s going on!”) is yes. But then eradicating work experience might create a bigger problem: an entire generation of people entering the workforce who go around telling colleagues they look like Noddy, pass out at the sight of a printer jam and struggle with the vital business skill of hiding their true feelings.

The National Council for Work Experience suggests the way forward is for businesses to put more effort into their placements. It has developed a quality mark, designed to act as a standard by which employers can measure their provision. But the problem with such an approach is that it doesn’t address the lie at the heart of work experience. The word “experience” implies a student being able to immerse themselves in a job. But, of course, in practice they can’t do that because: (a) some of them don’t even have the initiative to ask where the loo is, let alone do any real work; (b) some of us are too busy doing our jobs to train students to dabble in our jobs; (c) some of us couldn’t train students to do our jobs if we wanted to, because we’ve become so dysfunctional in our working habits that we can’t actually articulate what it is we do and how we do it; and (d) some of our jobs require specific skills that take time to develop.

Indeed, it seems to me that it would be more sensible for business to go the other way with work experience: to lower its game. Rather than going down the American road of organised internships, we should go back to the future and replace “work experience” with the defunct notion of “work shadowing”, where, instead of spending a fortnight behind an office plant with nothing to do, students do nothing in the vicinity of a worker for a short while.

If you think about it, shadowing is better than “experience” in almost every respect. It takes no longer than a day or two, so is therefore both a more efficient use of everyone’s time, and fairer, because even kids from poor backgrounds can afford to do it. It involves students watching what is going on, and workers therefore don’t have the challenge of explaining what it is they do. And, best of all, as shadows will inevitably be bored rigid by what they see that when we ask them to get us a latte, they will do so gratefully.

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