A Week of Work Experience

For several years now, we have supported the local schools and its students through periods of work experience. Whether this has been for a single week, or an ongoing agreement throughout the summer, whichever way it has come about, we are always happy to accommodate for work experience placements.

In June 2018, we had the pleasure of being joined by two 6th form students from Sherburn High School. Matthew and Evan, who are in year 12 at the local high school, joined us for a week to learn about marketing, websites and be a part of the general office environment. Both students were keen to develop their computer skills, wanting to broaden their knowledge and skillset on different computer software and devices.

We allowed the students to sit in on our weekly planning meeting, which gave them a feel for an informal office meeting, during this meeting they were given several tasks and projects to work on during the week. We gave them tasks to test particular skills such as attention to detail, research skills, writing skills – all of which are vitally important skills when working within the marketing sector. As well as these tasks, Matt and Evan were given 2 main projects they would work on solely and together, allowing for both independent work and teamwork skills to be developed.

The first task was to promote and market an upcoming business conference. The Business Network Group hold an annual conference each September, the students were given to task to fully advertise and help market this event to help drum up interest. This involved designing posters and leaflets, with relevant content and images, writing a press release about the event which will go in local newspapers, they also had to find newspapers to promote the event in, research online websites where they can also showcase the conference and finally create a social media plan, with lists of posts and tweets we can use during the run-up and actual the event.

The second task was a photography task. One of our clients needed some product photography to use on their newly developed website, both Matt and Evan assisted with the creation of these images. After an interactive brainstorm of innovative photo ideas, we could begin shooting. We had photography lights to help produce better quality images, and along with the help of the students, we produced some excellent product images which look amazing on the new site.

It was a pleasure to work with Evan and Matt for the week, their contributions were really valuable to our business, we hope they enjoyed their week at Creative Shed and hopefully learnt some new skills and had a bit of fun too (even if it was by playing ping pong)!