We treat work experience seriously and this week we were joined by Luke Berry, a 15 year old aspiring web developer from Redruth School. Rather than sitting him in the corner and asking him to make tea for us all day, we like to put our students through their paces in a supervised professional environment from the first moment they contact us, so we ask for CVs and portfolios and we do mock interviews and then when we’ve chosen our candidate for the year we get them involved with live client-facing projects as much as we can.
The idea of this is that at the end of the week, the person will have a good idea of whether web development or web design is for them. They’ve experienced multi-tasking, and working to deadlines, and ultimately they will know how a project works from start to finish as they will have had experience of projects throughout the development cycle from proposal to launch. Despite the high levels of supervision throughout, we hope that we really give a flavour of what it’s actually like working in a busy agency.
With this in mind, here’s Luke’s report of what he did this week, which I thought I’d share.
–
Hey, my name is Luke Berry and I have been asked to write about my Work Experience week here at Slightly Different.
I have always been interested in computers. My Dad and I built my first when I was only 6 years old, he introduced me to Web Design and since then I have been mainly self taught. I decided to come and work at Slightly Different because I thought it would be a great experience for me to learn about everything that happens in a professional Web Development workplace.
I started working on Monday 29th of June. I was introduced to everyone who works here, and set to work doing WordPress Configuration. I found some fixes for some of the sites (Mainly Internet Explorer 6). I spent a lot of time working on Bugworld and the William Turner Sheffield websites. Rob and I fixed most of the IE6 problems.
I worked on the Friends and Relations site, troubleshooting a problem that was happening on different browsers, such as IE7 and Firefox 2. There was a weird problem that was only affecting those two browsers. I eventually came up with a fix and it works fine now.
I have enjoyed every moment I have spent here, and feel that I have learnt an awful lot. I hope that I can keep in contact with the ‘crowd’ here at Slightly Different.
I have come away from this with more than I could have ever expected. I have learnt how a business such as this is organized, and how they get things done. There is only one thing that I am not happy about. The fact that I couldn’t stay longer.
–
Thanks very much for your time, Luke, and keep up the good work.
Jeremy Hurst
Managing Director
