Foundation Apprentices Diary

Over past few months we have been completing various different tasks during our work placement in the marketing team at Ayrshire College.  These tasks have helped us to improve on our communication skills and several others that are key in the real world.  Some of these tasks included:

Interviewing

We both had to interview each other and record it.  This was quite nerve racking at the start as we were both shy and unaware of how to properly interview each other.  However, our colleagues helped us on what type of questions to ask, and how to make them entertaining.  A few weeks later we were asked to interview at the Hello! Creatives event to create some publicity around the launch of this network and also we interviewed some sport and fitness students for a case study. By this time we had practiced, and were much more confident in interviewing, all thanks to the rest of the marketing team.  Learning how to interview has made us both much more confident and outgoing.

Creative Network – Hello! Creatives

This was a project created to get creative students together and raise awareness about job opportunities in their industry and creating connections to potential employers.  We were asked to come up with a list of ideas for interesting content that we would then post on the Hello! Creatives Facebook group.  This was quite difficult at the start as we had no idea of the type of content to post on social media that was informative and fun.  However, our boss, Shelagh, gave us a good idea of the content she was looking for, and showed us posts from previous similar events.  We then felt much more comfortable and were able to create a content calendar of all the ideas. 

Graduation 

One of the most enjoyable and our favourite task during our time so far, was preparing and attending the 2019 graduation as it was a completely different experience for us and wasn’t just sitting at a computer all day.  For the first two graduations we prepared the certificates and set up the venues, which was interesting to see how much time and effort the team put into one night for the students.  We were able to set up and help out at the Kilwinning graduation which was really good, as we could see the outcome of all our hard work and planning, and it felt very rewarding to be involved and part of the event.

Assessments

As part of our Foundation Apprenticeship we have to complete four main assessment tasks to gain our qualification.  It includes several different tasks such as communication and producing business documents.  At first we struggled with completing these assessments as it was very new to us, and we were unsure of how to complete the tasks, but after a meeting with Shelagh and our assessor Fiona, we were able to complete and pass our first assessment.

From our time during this course we have learned that communication is key, and if you need any help just ask and people will be happy to help with whenever they can.  The team were very different from what we were expecting as they are all kind and funny.  We were also surprised by how much preparation and planning goes into all the events that the college run.