Creating our own work experiences

When Milly’s school didn’t offer her a work experience opportunity, her family decided to use their emerging knowledge of Customised Employment to create a personalised work experience. Milly’s interest in sewing sparked the idea of making and selling scrunchies while learning some valuable business skills. With the support of her sewing teacher and a business mentor, she established a microenterprise called Made by Miss Milly.

Over several years, Milly expanded her product range, which she now sells online, at local markets, and through a co-op retailer. Thanks to her growing skills and confidence, Milly was invited to undertake work experience at a large local organisation and has since been employed as a part-time administrative assistant.

Video transcript

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Creating our own work experiences

Simone Whitehead, Milly’s mother:

Milly’s kind and caring. She’s really friendly. She loves people. She loves to engage with people, find out about their families and their pets.

We discovered Milly’s love of sewing, I think, in year eight or nine. And the teacher would say to me, “She can put colours together beautifully, and she’s trying really hard, and she loves the class.”

I think at the end of year nine, I started to think about work experience because that is what my two older sons had done typically, and nothing had really been offered up as such. So I started to ask teachers about what might happen and how work experience might sort itself out. They obviously didn’t have many ideas.

Then one of the teachers mentioned Imagine More to me and said, “Have a look at their website. They’ve got some good webinars and resources to help you get started.”

Fiona McIntosh, School to Work Project facilitator at Imagine More:

School to Work is all about building the capacity of families, and so we do that through offering webinars, offering face-to-face workshops. We do some one-to-one support with families, and also we run peer groups as well. So I run the Customised Employment Peer Group.

Simone Whitehead:

Well, at the end of the peer group, Fiona often says, “If you’d like a one-on-one conversation, we’re here to help discuss in more detail about where you’re at with your young person and offer assistance.” And we arranged the meeting, and Fiona came round, and it was, yeah, fabulous. You know, you feel like a weight’s been lifted. Yeah, just, you know, opening up opportunities, what’s possible. You know, you’re not stuck in this “what’s going to happen” cycle and worry, and you can see, you know, there is a great path forward, yeah.

Fiona McIntosh: 

I guess when I first met with Simone to go through the Discovery process, and I was really just asking Simone about what was it that Milly enjoyed doing, what really kind of lit her up, what kind of things was she doing without being asked? And from what Simone shared with me, um, yeah, you could just start to see the patterns kind of come out in terms of what it was that, you know, certain themes around what Milly was interested in.

Simone Whitehead:

With the lack of work experience, that maybe we could start selling scrunchies and on a little Instagram page. Um, and so we discussed that with the sewing teacher, and she thought that was a great idea, and they started making quality product, and we sold to friends and family. And that was a way of us doing our own work experience, I guess. And so Made by Miss Milly was born. Yeah.

With Made by Miss Milly, we started very small. We started selling the scrunchies really to family and friends. And then over a couple of years, we added in the garlands and the felt ball decorations and did a couple of stalls. So it evolved over, yeah, a number of years. And then we thought, yeah, we’ll get a business mentor, and I approached Juanita, and she said yes, thankfully. And that’s when we started looking at further developing Made by Miss Milly on her Instagram page and approaching Trove.

Milly Whitehead:

Since I started my own business, I learned how to keep things in order, how to do people’s orders, how to do social media posts, acorns, scrunchies, improving my skills. I like to make really high-quality products so they look presentable for my clients.

Fiona McIntosh:

In Customised Employment, it’s really about starting with the person, not with the job. So it’s about understanding the person’s interests, their conditions for success—so the things that they need in their environment to thrive at work—and also understanding their skills. Instead of applying for jobs in the traditional way, people would approach workplaces where they think there might be an alignment between what they value and the person’s skills and look to customise a role within that workplace.

Simone Whitehead:

I was really lucky. I had met through my community network, which is built up via contacts from Imagine More, and just increasing that circle, and um, I’d mentioned how difficult it was to find work experience. And this friend, she was a senior director in a large company in Canberra. She understood the Customised Employment, and she also had a child with disability, so understood, and she offered Milly a work experience role in her office. It was the best thing that happened to us. We were very lucky, but it came through just talking to people in the community.

Well, talking with Imagine More, they emphasise, you know, you have a vision, and then you create a visual resume that highlights all your strengths and using photographs. It’s just a really visual, direct way of showing employers what your young person can do, and with dot points, just briefly outlining her strengths in each area and what she can offer. So that’s been great. We took it along first of all to her work experience at school in the office, and then again to the childcare. And everywhere we go, everyone is so impressed. So it’s been a great tool to have.

It led to an offer from Imagine More for Milly to come and work one morning a week doing office work. She jumped at the chance. The office environment at Imagine More is just perfect for Milly. She gets on with everyone there. She enjoys their company, and she enjoys the work.

Milly Whitehead: 

At Imagine More in the office, I enjoy making social media posts on Canva and filling in people’s feedback, using their forms, packing away resources for their events. I realised that I loved picking out colours and doing all sorts of that stuff.

Simone Whitehead: 

In mid-high school, from not knowing where Milly and her future were heading, it’s not all up up up, you know, you have your challenges, but it’s always moving in the right direction. I had a bleak outlook back then, and now it’s just positive, yeah.