Celebrating 1 year as a Digital Marketing Apprentice

Celebrating 1 year as a Digital Marketing Apprentice

Read here about how Toby has progressed in his digital marketing apprenticeship and has now been working at HBTC for a full year now!

It’s been a whole year since I started my apprenticeship here at HBTC. Whoop whoop! For those who need a quick catch-up, make sure you check out my previous blog posts before diving into this one.👇

Now that you’re all caught up on my other 2 articles we can have a look into what I am doing now. The fundamentals of my role haven’t changed; I still complete telephone interviews with candidates, engage with schools and assist in running the digital channels for HBTC. What is unique to my digital marketing role compared to most is I engage with schools and complete in-person marketing. Plus I help out completing admin tasks and I am heavily involved within the recruitment team, it’s very diverse and fits the cliché of “no two days are the same.”

I am also now further down the line on my portfolio, I have completed 3 projects and passed 2 exams, including the Google Analytics exam, which I am particularly proud of!

The digital marketing aspect of my apprenticeship has grown dramatically over the past year. I am now running, planning and scheduling posts on all our social media pages. To add to this I am engaging with the rest of the marketing team to help generate new ideas and find ways to implement them.

An achievement I am most proud of is my ‘Mythbusters’ series, a compilation of posts fashioned for our social media pages trying to tackle the myths and labels prescribed to apprenticeships. It’s about breaking down and trampling the walls of stereotypes built up around apprenticeships. It was the project I spearheaded and I even did the graphic design myself (graphic design is not one of my strengths!) Overall it received strong engagement and feedback, I will be looking to do a second series of this next year.

We have managed to smash our Facebook reach out of the park this year (Facebook reach is a metric displaying how many people will have seen your post on their feed). In addition to this we have launched the HBTC TikTok page. As a business, if you haven’t got a TikTok page just yet, I highly recommend it! Not only is it immense fun to create, edit and film these clips. But you can also use it as an excuse to go and annoy your co-workers too. What’s not to love!

I would love to sit here and tell you that we have become a viral sensation and currently awaiting our red carpet walk in Leicester Square, London for our TikTok premiere. Unfortunately, we haven’t achieved the dream just yet, but if you would like to help us reach these dizzying heights then please do check out the link below!

@hbtc_training

We try to mix up our posts on TikTok between, informative and entertaining. It’s a difficult balance to create, I would say we have often done well with this. Being a business on TikTok is challenging, it’s very user-oriented, and brands on average do struggle, they often lack relatability and are seen as ‘invasive.’ I would say overall we’ve managed to avoid this so far, but it’s always tricky to ensure we don’t do this.

Moving onto email marketing, the achilles heel of mine. It’s not been a particular area of strength for me so far but it’s an area I am consistently looking at and trying to improve. I describe it as building a jigsaw of the Mona Lisa, I know how it should look, I have all the pieces, but bringing it all together and creating it can be a challenge.

Another large aspect of my job that has evolved this year has been my school engagement. Since I joined in November last year, I have attended 34 separate events, averaging one every 7.6 working days. It’s an area I am still keen to develop and hopefully build some stronger relationships with schools over the next year.

A particular highlight has to be completing a CV workshop with Year 8’s at The Market Weighton School, it did wonders for my confidence as I was running classes all morning. It was a barrel of fun helping build CVs organising teams etc. Presenting has been a key area I have developed over the year, I am far from the complete package in this area, but my confidence has grown astronomically which included presenting to a group of sixth-formers and there were around 80 of them!

With the apprenticeship content I have been learning I have almost finished all the content I need to learn, I only have 1 lesson left to go! I still have another exam to pass, but I have passed my ‘Principles of Coding’ exam, as well as my ‘Google Analytics Certification.’ That leaves me with just the ‘Online and Offline’ exam left to complete.

The lessons have been extremely enjoyable and informative. What I have most enjoyed is being able to speak, share and listen with others who have a passion and an interest in marketing. I particularly enjoyed learning about coding and how websites are structured in code, I have always been interested in the backend of websites and being able to learn how they get developed has been fascinating.

Finally moving onto challenges I have faced throughout the year. If anyone reading this has or is completing an apprenticeship, then I’m sure you will understand how challenging it can be. Whether that’s balancing time between completing workshops and managing time on your job. Dealing with the lack of experience, it can be difficult to understand that as an apprentice it is okay to make mistakes, sometimes when you make one you can dread and think of the worst. But the employer has taken you on understanding that you are an apprentice and you will make mistakes, being an apprentice is a process, it is a gradual learning experience.

To conclude, the past year has been amazing. The apprenticeship has helped boost my confidence massively and developed my digital skills greatly. I am still learning so much, and the great thing about marketing is, it’s constantly changing, ensuring you’re always kept on your toes.

I’m looking forward to progressing even further with the help of the team and fingers crossed, achieving my apprenticeship next year!

If you’ve been inspired by my journey so far, I greatly encourage you to take a look at our current digital marketing apprenticeship vacancies!