Work Experience

Here at the Trust, our employees and volunteers have an astonishingly varied skillset. This means we can offer rich, challenging and unusual work experience placements at many of our places. You can learn about work, explore your interests and develop professional skills for future employment.

Locations

We’ve a central office in Swindon, and hundreds of amazing indoor and outdoor places across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. It’s worth thinking about which property you’d like to work at and which is easy to travel to, although please remember that we can’t offer placements at every single one of our properties.

Find a work experience location (opens in new window).

Type of work

Whatever career or specialist path you’re interested in, there’ll most likely already be someone doing it for us. We already employ many different people, including wardens, conservators, archaeologists, botanists, accountants, IT specialists, receptionists, solicitors, property managers, policy advisors, builders, architects, cleaners, strategists, administrators, chefs, caterers, retailers, youth and community workers, volunteer coordinators, theatre managers and gardeners.

And, although there may be some legal restrictions on what you’re allowed to do, you’ll always be allowed to observe others that are already qualified. So when you’re applying for work experience, think about what skills and knowledge you want to develop.

Find out more about what we do

Length of work experience

If you’re at school, most work experience will take place over a week as part of your school’s work experience programme. Some schools now offer extended work experience placements, which take place one or two days a week over a period of months, and in some cases you can do work experience during school holidays.

We try to cater for different needs, but because each placement is dealt with individually we can’t, unfortunately, guarantee a placement that suits you.

How to apply for work experience

Please complete the enquiry form (opens PDF document in new window) as fully as you can, and email it to volunteering@nationaltrust.org.uk. To help us to offer the best possible placements, please:

1. Be clear on your enquiry form why you want to have work experience with us, and what you hope to achieve.
2. Be open and honest and tell us in good time if you wish to cancel your placement.
3. Try your best during your time with us and tell us how we can improve in the future.

In return we will:

1. Inform you as soon as we can about potential placements.
2. Try to ensure that the placement lives up to your expectations and that you develop the skills you have identified.
3. Give you constructive feedback on how you have done.
4. Improve future placements based on your comments.

Unfortunately we can’t guarantee to find you a place, but the more information you can provide on the form below, and the more flexible you are, the greater the chances that we’ll be able to help you.