How it Works

Host job shadowing opportunities to drastically increase your exposure while giving back to the community!

Through our network students can individually request to job shadow at a company. The requests made on our site get routed directly to a contact at the company where the host company can then individually approve job shadow requests.

This is a flexible option for both companies and students as you can independently determine a good time and duration of the job shadow experience. A request through our site also allows a student to tell the company a little about themself and why they are interested in job shadowing at their company.

Shadow Event Structures

Shadow events can vary a lot. Here are some typical structures we see.

You have full freedom to mix and match aspects of these structures, or even make one up entirely on your own. This list is only meant to help give you some ideas.

Full-Day

This type of structure brings in shadowees in the morning and concludes the day near the end of the working day. This type of structure gives adequate time for shadowees to get a good perspective on the job/company and to ask any questions.
In a full day structure you will have to account for things such as lunch (will you provide or will they, are shadowees allowed to go offsite?), and keeping your shadowees excited. A whole day of work can be exhausting, especially if you are only watching the work. How will you spice things up? Show them around the different departments? Introduce them to the CEO? With a full day structure you have more opportunities to excite or bore your shadowees, so consider strongly what the whole day will look like.

Half-Day

As the name implies, this shadowing structure involves only having shadowees at the company for half a day or even just a few hours.
This is the most common structure we see as it condenses the time a shadowee is exposed to your company, making it more efficient and less time consuming. This structure can shed light on the key insights of a job but may lack the time needed to truly get a well rounded look at what the job and company has to offer.

Centrally Guided

This structure involves using a main guide(s) for your shadowees that can show them the job(s) they are shadowing even if that main guide does not work in those jobs. This main guide can be someone like a recruiter, someone that is used to articulating the value of the company to students.

Open Structure

This is where a company does not change the structure of its day around the presence of a shadowee. This is a good way to see exactly what it is like to work at the company.
If there are a lot of meetings, the shadowee comes along. If that day requires more offsite work than usual, the shadow gets to see that too.
This structure is most convenient for the company and the most realistic but may not give the most well rounded experience.

Multi-Guided

This is where a company can have one or many employees dedicated to walking their shadowees through the day to day of working at their company.

This structure can be a 1 on 1 scenario or you can pair one employee with multiple shadowees.

This structure makes it easier for shadowees to ask questions and gain a personal perspective of the work from your employee. However, this can be time consuming for the employee, taking them away from their work.