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By the time they apply, the choice is already made.
Career preferences crystallise around age 14. Six years before a candidate fills out your apprenticeship form, the decision between your sector and someone else’s has effectively been made — and your brand was probably nowhere in the room when it happened. Immersive Work Experience puts you there. Branded, virtual or in-person, AI-graded, ages 14+.
The cost of being invisible at 14
The pipeline you compete in is too narrow, and you’re fighting for it too late.
Most early-careers attraction effort lands at age 18–19 — UCAS clearing, university milkrounds, the careers fair circuit. By then, the candidate’s mental model of “jobs I might do” was set five years earlier, by which brands they encountered at school.
If you weren’t one of those brands, you’re competing on price for the candidates who already chose your sector elsewhere.
Career preferences crystallise
age 14
Most candidates have decided their broad sector before they pick GCSE options.
Schools never reached
60%
UK secondary schools that don’t see a careers session from a recognisable employer in a typical year.
DHL’s 2025 reach
38k
Students engaged through DHL’s Immersive Work Experience programme in one year.
Completion rate
3×
DHL IWX completion rate vs sector benchmark for online careers content.
If you don’t fix this
You hire from the same narrow pool as everyone else — and pay more for it each year.
The downstream cost of an invisible-at-14 brand strategy compounds. The candidate pool that knows your sector exists is the candidate pool every other employer in your sector is also fighting for. That drives applicant cost-per-acquisition up, candidate quality (relative to spend) down, and diversity numbers nowhere — because the candidates who weren’t in your pool at 14 are still not in it at 21.
A brand that wasn’t there at year 9 is competing for second-choice candidates at year 13.
The fix is to be there at year 9. Not with a careers fair stand and a leaflet, but with structured work the candidate actually does — with their hands, on a real-feeling project, in your industry, with feedback. The signal it produces (motivation, engagement, learning agility, communication) feeds directly into the Assessment Platform when those candidates apply five years later. The brand association — this is what working at this employer is actually like — is what every brand-tracker survey is trying to manufacture, and rarely does.
What students actually do
Not passive content. Real-feeling work, built around decisions.
The strongest IWX programmes feel practical: students make, test, discuss, review and explain. That is where employer brand becomes tangible, and where useful behavioural signal starts to appear.
Problem solving
Students work through choices, trade-offs and constraints.
Decision making
Digital tasks show how candidates reason with information.
Feedback loops
Review, discussion and iteration make the signal richer.
How we deliver IWX
Six things that are always in the design.
Most “virtual work experience” products are videos with a multiple-choice quiz. Ours are designed by ex-engineering, ex-finance and ex-creative-industry practitioners and built around real decisions. Every IWX programme ships with all six.
Featured · DHL UK
Case study · 2025 logistics IWX programme
DHL: 38,000 students engaged, in one year.
DHL’s UK Immersive Work Experience programme reached 38,000 students aged 14–18 across the 2025 cohort — logistics, distribution and supply-chain projects, branded throughout, AI-graded with feedback. The 19% completion rate beat the sector benchmark of 6% by three-fold. Of the candidates who later applied to DHL early-careers programmes, 41% cited the IWX experience as the reason they considered the sector at all.
38k
Students engaged
19%
Completion (3×)
41%
Cited IWX in app
What this connects to
IWX is more powerful with the rest of the stack.
IWX as a stand-alone is useful — you reach more young people, you build brand at year 9, you do something measurably good for social mobility. But its real leverage is as the front of a connected pipeline.
The behavioural signals we capture during IWX feed the Assessment Platform when those same candidates later apply. That’s why IWX-engaged candidates outperform CV-only candidates at hire by 1.6× on first-year performance.
Platform
TalentXP
The Immersive Work Experience platform — where the content, scoring and signal capture lives.
Sister solution
Schools Engagement
The schools network and 14+ engagement programmes that distribute IWX content.
Downstream
Assessment Platform
Behavioural signals captured during IWX feed selection at point-of-application.
Industry depth
All 7 sectors
IWX content libraries pre-built for every sector vertical we serve.
IWX programmes running for
DHL
Channel 4
Microsoft
RAEng
Schneider Electric
PwC
John Lewis
National Grid
Talk to the IWX team
Got an employer-brand gap at age 14?
Most clients start with a 60-minute design session: we walk through the IWX content libraries for your sector, show example programmes from comparable employers, and sketch what a year-one cohort would look like. No commitment; you walk away with a brief you could share with anyone.