In May, at CFS Events, we hosted a Year-10 pupil from a local school for her work experience week. We endeavoured to give her a good range of tasks that would provide an insight into working in events and what it’s like to work for our small, family run company. We were really impressed with her work ethic and asked her to write a blog about her biggest take-aways from her week as an events assistant. Here is what she wrote…
A colourful experience

On my first day of work experience at CFS Events, I met the staff and had a bit of a chat with a few of them about the Medical Education events they organise, before I was asked to create posters about their communication within the team and their individual preferences as to how they would like to be communicated with. [At CFS Events we use the Clarity4D colour energies to help maintain great communication and strong working relationships amongst our team]. This taught me the importance of communication, but also by using the computer every day, and software such as PowerPoint and Excel, has improved my computer-based skills.

Throughout the day I was asked to use Excel to highlight and organise a report according to document creation dates and expiration dates. This focussed me on more minuscule details and helped me to pick out important dates and information quickly and more efficiently.

Then at lunch time, we went on a team dog walk with one of staff’s dogs, and then got lunch from a nearby bakery, which was delicious! I could see that the staff we’re all besties and enjoyed socialising together in their breaks.

In the afternoon, I was asked to help create a questionnaire for the team’s mental health in the workplace. Then to ensure everything was accurate and correct, I had to go through and check it, but also make sure that all the right questions for their mental health were included before I sent the questionnaire out to them (the team). I learnt that every single communication or document that CFS create is checked by several staff members before being sent out. I was taught how the team do their proof reading across their emails, adverts and programmes, which takes time and accuracy. This wasn’t the most fun part of the work experience, but I could see why it was so important to do.

As it started to come to the end of my first day, my last task was to scan through a PMCPA code case and pick out key information from each paragraph in order to create bullet points so that one of the staff members could use the information to help her train the team on issues that might arise from not following the ABPI code. This was explained to me as a code that pharmaceutical companies (and CFS Events) need to follow when providing hospitality for healthcare professionals.

Throughout the rest of the week, as well as continuing to make the colour energy posters, I created some marketing emails for some new events with one of the staff members, and learned what type of information was needed to make these emails as detailed and professional as needed. I joined a team meeting where the team showed statistics of all their events and how to plan/market them effectively. I then was asked to create an image to post on their social media pages to advertise an event that they would be hosting later in the year.

At the end of the week, I had a debrief about how the work experience had gone and I was asked what my favourite part of the job was and which part of the work I had learnt the most from. I found the computer skills – using Excel to create spreadsheets and PowerPoint to create posters – the most useful and interesting thing, because prior to this week I had no real knowledge of how to use them. I also gave each staff member their colour-communication poster at the end of the week, so they could display it above their desk, and it was good to know I’d contributed to effective communication in the office. But the best part was the dog walks at lunch times and getting to chat to the team.

Overall, I believe this work experience at CFS Events has been useful, and a good experience to be able to look back on in the future.

Written by Izzi (Year-10 work experience)

 

For more information on CFS Events’ Event Management Services, please click here or email daisy@cfsevents.co.uk

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