It is always a good idea to try and get work experience if you can. It allows you the opportunity to get a better understanding of the industry and the roles within it before seriously embarking on a career. It also enables you to make some valuable contacts when you do need to secure a permanent job.
Getting Work Experience
In an ideal world you would target one agency with your CV and they would take you on for a couple of week’s work experience right away. The reality is unfortunately nothing like this. It is likely that you will need to send your CV to a huge number of agencies before you succeed. Our member agency list is a good starting point when working out which agencies to approach for work experience. Having researched who their clients are and which advertising campaigns they have produced, send your CV along with a cover letter to the agencies. It is a good idea to highlight why you thought a particular advertising campaign that they produced worked, or what you liked about it. You need to ensure that you have personalised the letter to that particular agency. No agency likes to feel as though they are part of a mail merge.
You can also try contacting Pathfinders - a recruitment company that specialises in marketing communications and who help by arranging 2-week unpaid work placements until they manage to find an opportunity for a full time/paid temporary work.
If you are successful in securing work experience at any agency then well done! Prior to starting your work experience, it would be a good idea to have a think about what you want to get out of your time at the agency. What you want to know, what you want to see, and what would make your time with the agency a success, are some questions you might like to ask yourself before the big day.
Agency life is fast-paced and dynamic. Be ready for the fact that things invariably change. Sometimes you may end up doing something totally different from what you expected to be doing that day. You may be ready for a meeting only to find that it has been cancelled or moved. This is part and parcel of agency life. Embrace this and adapt — the more flexible you are the better.
Social networking 
If you are on Facebook it is a good idea to join some of the Adland groups (e.g. 'Advertising Applicants 2009' and 'I'm in Advertising.....hell yeah!') where you can get talking to/networking with people. This is a very close knit industry and so you have to put yourself out in the circuit in order to get to know people. There are also some lists of different blogs on this website, including a mashup of popular blogs in our sector - why not read and comment on some of the ones you find interesting?
Latest News
You can also check up on the latest advertising and media stories by looking at our News pages (which, like a lot of other IPA content you can pull out of our site via RSS ) or bookmark our News mashup page where the latest industry news is fed to us from various advertising and media sites as it breaks.
How Work Experience helped
Work experience has proved an invaluable tool for certain people entering the industry. Here 6 industry grads talk about how work experience helped shape their careers