My name is Sasha and I’m a year 10 student at Matthew Arnold School. I did my work experience with Oxfordshire Apprenticeships during National Apprenticeship Week. I had so much fun and met loads of really friendly and welcoming people who taught me a lot about both the world of work and Apprenticeships.

On my first day I went to the Great Apprenticeship Bake Off 2016 at the County Hall Café. It was an event promoting Apprenticeships and raising money for the charity Yellow Submarine. It was a very busy day, but also loads of fun (although I’ve had enough carrot cake to last me a lifetime!). I took photos of the event, sent out my first tweet of many and helped run the raffle. When we went back to the office I wrote an article on the event, which was published on the Oxfordshire Apprenticeships website (check it out here: http://bit.ly/1RiBAiI).

On Tuesday I had my first experience of a ‘team meeting’, before going to the University of Oxford to hear a speech on Apprenticeships within the University. It was here that the new, first ever female Vice Chancellor spoke. She was also joined by one of Oxfordshire Apprenticeships’ Ambassadors, Sophie Jamieson, who talked about her role as an Apprentice. I took photos in the event and also posted a few tweets. We then got a tour of the labs from Sophie before I went back to the office and wrote another article, this time on the event, which you can read here: http://ow.ly/ZKl31. 

Wednesday consisted of me doing my work experience with those who organise work experience! I got to learn about how the other side of the process works and also got to do a few Health and Safety checks around some really interesting workplaces. In the afternoon I developed my spreadsheet skills, using Excel to record pieces of data.

I learnt how to create Infographics on Thursday, a really useful tool that I will definitely be using again in the future. I did one on the salaries of different jobs which you can see here: http://bit.ly/1R4hEge. I loved doing this and am really happy with the final result. At 1 o’clock I took part in #OAHour on twitter, a weekly hour on Thursdays which lets people ask questions about Apprenticeships and tells people what has been going on during the week. As it was National Apprenticeship Week there was lots of stuff to tweet about! I tweeted from the Apprenticeship Ambassadors twitter @ApprenticesROx. Finally I learnt how to make a ‘storify’ and began to make one of my week.

Friday mainly consisted of an event, hosted by BITC (Business In The Community), informing young people of Apprenticeships available and what they involved. I was taking photos of the session and sending out tweets. I also saw a few of my teachers here and told them about how I’d found my week. The students all left at 12 and those who were involved in running it had lunch. This meant I got to socialise with the Apprenticeship Ambassadors before going back to the office where I finished my storify (which you can see here: http://bit.ly/1XAizqu) and wrote this article!

I had such a fun time this week and would like to thank all the lovely people I met who made me feel so welcome while I was a part of the team.

Sasha Jeffery, Work Experience Student, Matthew Arnold School