How my short-term experience will lead to long-term career gains.

By Haana, ELBA work experience placement

As a sixth-form student that is currently aspiring to later enter the corporate environment, my ELBA work experience has proved to be an asset to me.

Spending a week with ELBA has allowed me to familiarise myself with the corporate office atmosphere, adjusting to the 9-5 timeline, and enabled me to see what would be expected of me in my day-to-day when working in an office-based company. Not to mention, the ELBA team have been very friendly and eager to help us in any way possible, through regular checkups, and warm attitudes. This has made my career aspirations feel a lot less daunting and intimidating. And, feel a lot more real!

ELBA is a charity dedicated to promoting social mobility. They do this by engaging business professionals in volunteering projects, local residents in employment schemes, and utilising resources given by the corporate sector to advance marginalised or disadvantaged individuals into career progression. ELBA and its partners make a difference, acting as a connector between the corporate sector, education and the community, hence improving social mobility.

Communication skills and critical thinking

During my work experience with ELBA, I was provided with many opportunities to grow and expand my skill set. For instance, after Lima the HR Assistant took me on an office tour and induction, we were handed our first task: analysing the ELBA website. What did the website do well how it could be improved. I created an in-depth presentation that included various recommendations. This strengthened my communication skills, as well as my critical thinking and detail-orientation.

Meeting etiquette

Next, we attended a few meetings throughout the week – digitally focused and with community partners – which allowed me to get a gist of the meeting process, and what would be expected of us for meetings, such as summarising in emails what was said, how to do this, as well as following examples of tone and attitude we should be bringing to these meetings.

Research

We also had several tasks based on data collection, both quantitative and qualitative. For example, for qualitative we took a deep dive on the internet and gathered data on disadvantaged boroughs in east London, we gathered the information from various different sources, and cleanly presented it in simple A4 pdf document format. This improved my information synthesis skills, qualitative research and analysis skills. One example of how we practiced organising quantitative data was through a data input task, of logging in data from ELBA event surveys. This further increased my efficiency and volume handling skills.

Finance and database tasks

I contributed to a finance report, summarising task on Excel, which allowed me to familiarise myself with a database heavily used in the corporate world, and strengthen my hard skills too.

Public speaking

I had voiced my struggles with public speaking to the ELBA team and to build confidence I was asked to deliver a presentation to the ELBA team on South Asian Heritage Month. This helped a huge deal giving me various transferable skills such as audience engagement, collaborating and communication in a team, public speaking etc. This boosted my workplace and personal confidence.

Personal highlights

I also participated in a CV and Mock interview workshop, which was my favourite opportunity as I received ultra personalised feedback on how I could improve and grow based on my performance. ELBA’s Head of Education, Maria, who has been so helpful throughout this work experience, even took my CV home and gave it to me with pen corrections the next morning!

My other favourite activity was the VR headset experience. I got to practice public speaking, a mock interview and dealing with difficult clients, then received very in-depth personalised feedback, with targeted back and forth practice. This experience helped immensely!

The power of the blog!

Finally, writing up my work experience into this blog has helped me clearly map out my professional and personal growth, and think about my past experiences and practical skills in relation to future endeavours.

Overall, navigating through the series of projects and opportunities over the five-day placement has strengthened my time management skills and work ethic.

In conclusion

I look forward to applying these invaluable experiences and broadened skill set I’ve picked up here at ELBA to enrich my CV and interviews, as well as implementing them into both my professional and personal life.

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