My week of work experience - by Tom

This is the journal written by Tom, a year 10 student from Carrum Downs Secondary College regarding his four days of work experience with Out of the Box Consulting. He was a great student who learned tasks quickly and was a pleasure to have.

Day 1

Tom - Work Experience Student

My first day working with Nicola from Out Of the Box Consulting was very interesting. We started off introducing ourselves.  Nicola explained what the job involved briefly touching on everything that we were going to do for the day, showing me some tip and tricks on multimedia marketing etc and then we dived straight into the first task.

I was very impressed by the amount of effort and thought that was obviously put in to squeeze me into her busy schedule already.  We started off doing some social media managing for a mechanic franchise, figuring out a clever post to hook in readers and hopefully keep readers engaged and thinking about their company. I learned that you can schedule posts using Hootsuite which links multiple accounts together or pages in this case. I was very intrigued to learn this not having any knowledge this existed.

Nicola then showed me how to manage and design a website using Weebly giving me the basic tools and knowledge so I could then make a slide show using Weebly for one of her clients Mim’s Boxing. She then showed me what a favicon was, having little prior knowledge I was fascinated to know that you could link something to your home page like an icon not really knowing what it was. I was even more fascinated to learn how create one using a favicon website.

After tinkering around with the Mim’s Boxing website and creating a favicon I was the introduced to Canva a website for designing cool photos and making ads. After having a little play around with Canva I was then set a task to make an ad for Mim’s Boxing focusing on advertising a kid’s party. I found myself very engaged at the task at hand not realising I had gone into my lunch break.

After finishing my lunch I moved onto making a second ad which I spent a lot more time on it, not being happy with my first copy I made a second one which took a lot longer than I expected but I was very happy with the finished product.

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Day 2

We started off doing a review of day 1 and touched on everything we did with Nicola making sure I understood everything.  I was still very interested and looking forward to meeting a Google Partner who does similar work to Nicola with web design and SEO that gets your website higher on the Google search.  I was disappointed to find out the meeting was cancelled. I went straight into writing my blog/journal and before I knew it I had finished writing my first day. 
Today Nicola showed me the grid rule for a Facebook ad which could only have 20% writing thus I could do my ads without any help only approval. I was eager to jump into some more design in Canva where I had to redo one of the Mim’s Boxing ads but was happy to do so. I felt pretty happy with the ads end result and so did Nicola. But when we compared it with the Facebook grid rule it was too large. I soon learned that this was all a part of the job and sometimes these things happen and there is nothing you can do about it. I finally finished the ad and I was very pleased with the final copy.

Our next client was 3X Personal Training who had requested a progression video for his business' two year anniversary.  I was tasked with designing some famous quotes and putting them with a background that represented something meaningful this took me the majority of the rest of the day to complete. 

Day 3

After having an amazing day at the Frankston Arts Centre and Cube 37 for my day 3 we went over to Rapid Click to start the day. I was looking forward to meeting Chris who does Google advertising and web design. We discussed how he did the SEO wording, Nicola and Chris talked about social media and how they would incorporate it for their clients and then I got a proper introduction to web design. I got shown various examples of how to manage a website and I was shown an in progress website and a finished product which was fascinating because I had only really done some basic website design.

Back at Out of the Box Consulting we changed some quotes and touched up the image for 3XPT to suit the clients requirements. This was a quick and easy fix that didn’t take us to long to complete. Nicola then got me to work on my blog/journal where I spent the remainder of the day completing. I took a short break while I was introduced to a webinar about phycology in marketing I was very interested to see how people brains work when buying things or making a decision which is 90% unconscious. Unfortunately we couldn’t hear the webinar properly so I let Nicola plug in a pair of headphones because she needed to listen. She then summarised the whole webinar I found this to be great general knowledge that I can use in everyday life and maybe for a future job option. 

Day 4

Today we worked on a 3XPT post for social media which I put in Canva and worked my magic for a food called Omega ABC spread which has almond, hazelnut and cashew in it. I where I edited the post and wrote down a quirky and engaging post for the reader. I jumped straight into some Hootsuite where I truly learnt how to use it and learnt how to schedule social media posts in advance. I learnt what times are good and what times wouldn’t suit particular audiences. I had no idea that about some of the times people above my age would go online with social media. This was all great knowledge I could take into my everyday life and how I use social media. Nicola then asked me to finish my blog/journal where I really sat down gave it some thought. That concludes my week of work experience with Out of the Box Consulting.