"I do a certificate three in financial services … I love financial services, I thought it was going to be the best week of my life," Bagavathy said of her placement at a financial firm.

"So I walk in, and all I ended up doing was buying crumpets for the owner (See image below).

"The entire office just loved crumpets."

While fellow Chatswood High School student Hannah avoided the grocery run, her week was just as uninspiring.

"I ended up going to a software company and what I ended up doing was simply copying and pasting code to make a simple pong game," she said.

When they returned to school feeling a little deflated, the pair did some research to work out whether they were alone in their experiences.

Put simply, they were not.

"We interviewed a tonne of people and found that when people did work experience, it was either a crap experience or [they didn't] do work experience because it was either too hard to find or they were discouraged by other people's poor experience," Hannah said.

Instead of overlooking the crumpet episode (Below), Hannah and Bagavathy saw an opportunity to launch their business Yakka.

"It's a match-making platform that connects high school students to businesses providing quality work experience," Bagavathy said.

Despite working on Yakka while juggling year 12, the pair have the Sydney School of Entrepreneurship and Generation Entrepreneur on their books.

They're currently in talks with Spark Festival, the City of Sydney and Westpac.

Regardless of their busy schedule, the girls are motivated to help young people find an exciting and appropriate career path.

"We find that high school students are really keen, they want to get into the workplace and do something meaningful for a business, but then they end up just filing papers or shredding things all day," Hannah said.

"We want to change that."

Reluctance to take students

Professor John Polesel from the University of Melbourne said there was limited research into the worth of school-based work experience.

But in terms of utilising young people in the workplace, he said Australia was way behind.

"Employers in Australia traditionally haven't had a huge amount of experience working with young people of school age compared with systems in Germany, Denmark, Austria, where you've got large apprenticeship-type programs which are centred on school-aged clients.

"I think in Australia there's been a bit more reluctance on the part of employers and industry to take on that role."

And with 250,000 young people (aged 15 to 24) currently unemployed, Professor Polesel said a renewed focus on work experience could help alleviate the problem.

"I think there's a tendency in Australia to see the pathway to senior secondary school into university as the only legitimate pathway," he said.

"What we know from a number of research studies is that pathways into good vocational education after school can, in some cases, produce better outcomes than pathways into some university courses."

Source | ABC