Most sixth-formers applying for economics have not spent a fortnight at an investment bank. Every year we read statements from students convinced that’s a problem. It isn’t — and we want to explain why, then show you exactly how to fix it if your only work experience is a part-time job that doesn’t sound impressive on paper.

What a tutor is actually testing for

A tutor reading your Q3 answer — what else have you done to prepare, and why is it relevant — does not actually care how prestigious your placement sounds. They can’t verify the bank internship was any good anyway. What they’re checking is much simpler: can you spot an economic idea sitting inside an ordinary situation, or can’t you? A fortnight of shadowing an analyst who wouldn’t let you near anything interesting can score worse on that test than a Saturday job at a café, if the café answer is the one that’s actually done the thinking.

The café example

We come back to this one more than any other, because it’s the clearest version of the mistake. A student has a part-time job at a local café and writes:

Weak: “I worked part-time at a local café, which taught me valuable skills in teamwork and customer service.”

Read that sentence again. Now imagine it written by someone who worked at a different café, or a supermarket, or a cinema — it doesn’t change. Nothing in it is actually about this job, this café, or this student. It’s a placeholder that any part-time worker anywhere could submit. It demonstrates that a job happened, not that a mind was switched on while it was happening.

Now the same job, same shifts, looked at properly:

Stronger: “Working weekends at a café through a cost-of-living squeeze, I watched the owner raise prices twice in six months and lose almost no regulars — a live example of the price inelasticity of demand for habitual goods that I’d only met before as a diagram.”

Nothing about the job changed. The student didn’t do anything more prestigious. They just noticed something economic happening in front of them, and wrote down the mechanism instead of “teamwork and customer service.” Regulars who buy the same coffee every morning don’t really shop around on price the way a textbook demand curve implies they should — habit and convenience make demand sticky, and that’s exactly what a whiteboard diagram can’t show you but a real café can. (This is the same example we use to illustrate Q3 of the three-question format — it’s worth the repetition, because it’s the clearest template we know.)

A second worked example

Here’s a composite template that isn’t about coffee. Say a student works Saturdays on a supermarket checkout.

Weak: “Working on the checkout at my local supermarket has given me excellent customer service skills and taught me to work well under pressure.”

Forgettable, and it could describe any till job in the country.

Stronger: “Working Saturdays on a supermarket checkout, I noticed the self-checkout queue backing up on payday weekends while staffed tills sat half-used — people seemed to trust a person to catch a scanning error on an unfamiliar brand more than they trusted the machine, even though the self-checkout was faster either way. It struck me as a live example of information asymmetry shaping a choice that had nothing to do with price at all.”

There’s always an economic idea sitting in an ordinary shift. The job is to notice it, not to invent a more impressive job.

Family businesses

The same rule applies to a weekend or summer spent helping out at a relative’s shop or trade, which we see almost as often as café jobs.

Weak: “I helped out at my uncle’s business, which taught me about how a company runs.”

That tells a tutor nothing. What did you actually see? A decision about whether to raise a price, drop a supplier, or take on extra staff during a busy period — pick one, and follow the reasoning behind it through to what happened next. The activity doesn’t need to be dressed up. It needs an idea inside it.

If you genuinely have no work experience at all

Some applicants have no part-time job, no family business, and no formal placement to draw on — and that’s a real gap, not a moral failing, and it’s fixable without needing a bank to say yes. A few starting points that count as legitimate preparation, as long as you develop them the same way as everything above rather than just naming them:

• A structured virtual programme. Several major employers and platforms run free virtual insight days or short virtual internships open to sixth-formers — these are genuinely useful raw material, but only if you extract a specific idea from one task or session rather than listing the programme’s name.
• An EPQ or independent research project. A self-directed question you’ve pursued over several months does the same job as work experience: it shows sustained, self-motivated engagement with a real problem, and it’s entirely within your control to arrange.
• A school or community role with an economic angle. Running a small enterprise scheme, managing a society’s budget, or organising an event with real costs and real constraints all generate the same kind of material as a part-time job — a decision, a trade-off, a mechanism you can name.
• Structured reading paired with your own analysis, of the kind we cover in our supercurriculars post — not a substitute for work experience exactly, but evidence of the same underlying thing a tutor is checking for: can you think economically about something you weren’t taught to think about.

None of these need to be dressed up as more than they are. The test is identical to the café example: don’t tell us what the activity was called, tell us what you noticed.

The bit worth remembering

A tutor reading your statement is not scoring you on how impressive your placement sounds. They can’t interview the investment bank about how good your internship really was, and honestly, most two-week shadowing placements involve a lot of sitting quietly in the corner of a meeting anyway. What they can see clearly on the page is whether you noticed something economic while you were there, wherever “there” was. An ordinary Saturday job with a sharp observation beats a prestigious placement with a vague one, every time we’ve marked one against the other.

Where to go from here

If your work experience section currently reads like a CV line — job title, dates, “teamwork and communication” — go back to the shift itself and ask what you actually noticed happening around price, behaviour, or supply while you were there. That’s the sentence worth writing. If you want a second pair of eyes on whether your version has actually landed on the “shown” side of that line, that’s exactly what a review from EconCoaching is for.

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