Beneficial Finance, the place where I worked for my work experience was a one floor, quite a large main big office where most of the people worked and to the side there were a couple smaller offices, at the back of the main room there were a storage room and the staff room. Which was used quite regularly. The sort of work that Beneficial Finance do, is giving credit or loans to people who cant get them from major banks i. e. Barclays or Natwest. HSC bank works together with beneficial finance, the credit is given when a customer buys a product from a certain company most of the loans that were given were from Courts, the furniture shop.

All the employees whilst at my working experience were welcoming and friendly, some were quite and just got on with their work, but some were quite outgoing and funny i. e. make jokes, there were some pretty funny stories and conversations too. The workers in the office had varied jobs i. e. photocopying, printing, computer work, phoning people, going out visiting people who owed money, like a bailiff, posting letters, writing letters and inputting data into computers.

In each morning the branch manager (Leon) gives out a target for the workers to aim for, for the day, this would include money targets and hopefully an amount of clients each worker had to get in each day. This was usually around 3-5 people. The citizenship work (preliminary work for the coursework) fit into what the company did because it helped me understand more about the health and safety aspect of the business.

Each worker was part of a union or some were part of more than one, most of the employees were probably part of a white collar union i. e. unions which represent clerical and professional workers, also there will be employment laws protecting the workers if something happens e. g. an accident. Whilst at Beneficial Finance I found out something’s I didn’t know about the company i. e. what it did and why they did it e. g. they give credit to people when purchasing items which are a fair bit of money and they do this because that some people cannot get loans from regular banks so they go to Beneficial Finance as the rates are cheaper.

My overall opinion of where I worked it was not too bad, it was quite boring at times but it gave me an idea of working life, and made me realise that from that experience I wouldn’t want to get into that type of occupation as it did not look very exciting. Planning The practicle citizenship activity was to go on work experience and to see, feel what working life was like for two weeks, most people went to different work places; for instance I went to Beneficial Finance. This relates to my topic of Health and Safety which I am doing the course-work on.

For this my aims are; * To find more about the company (as I know very little about it) * See what they do * How they do it * Collect useful information i. e. leaflets etc… I will mainly need to find things on Health and Safety issues but other information I collect would be good also, this helping to learn more about the business etc. Things on Health and Safety that I could find out about may possibly be, how often is the fire drill, where to go incase of a fire etc… and to spot which health and safety signs, rules regulations are in the business block.

To find most of this information out I would be ideal to ask the employees, look around and pick up leaflets which they have. Here are some good points and bad points about asking the workers and picking up leaflets. Asking the workers Picking up Leaflets Advantages Disadvantages Advantages Disadvantages Get information first-hand form the workers. Interrupting workers whilst they may be busy. Get more information about the company. May not be allowed to take them as they are for clients. Gain confidence to approach people in the future.

They may choose not to answer my questions. The information on them will be easy to understand. May take more than one and leave none for others. I think that I could Interview people about their work, ask for information, ask people to answer questionnaires, surveys, take photographs of the work place, look through leaflets, magazines, get minutes of meetings, phamphlets and charts. All information which will be collected would mainly be recorded on pieces of paper ready to be sorted out and then written up in neat as my coursework.