My first month as a Digital Marketing Apprentice at HBTC

My name’s Toby, and I have just begun my apprenticeship working in Hull at HBTC as a Learner Engagement Marketing Apprentice, I’ve started the Level 3 Digital Marketing Apprenticeship and will have completed it in August in a year and a halves time!

I’ll be documenting my journey as an apprentice over the next year in a series of articles posted on our website, in the hopes that it will inspire others to take that first step and give them the confidence to go and do an apprenticeship!

I finished doing my degree this year at Sheffield Hallam University studying History and acquired a 2:2, annoyingly I was only 0.05 off a 2:1! After completing my degree, I felt a sense of disorientation and no clear-cut direction to head in for my career. I had known for about 2 years that I wanted to head into digital marketing but I lacked any real work experience in the industry to make me stand out from the crowd.

Simply looking for digital marketing roles with my degree was not enough, in the grand scheme of things the company you apply for would rather you have experience than any degree you’ve earned. The greatest way I found to get this experience was to start looking at certain types of apprenticeships. The best apprentice jobs I found to fit the career I wanted was the digital marketing apprenticeship. I then managed to secure this apprenticeship with the help from the Recruitment Team at HBTC in Hull.

My first day nerves were not as much as most people will experience on their first day starting their new job, as HBTC arrange an ILAP (learning plan) meeting before you start which provides a great way to meet the employer and helps you get to grips, get to know the company and your apprenticeship. Hence this made my first day feel a lot calmer. The first few days consisted of understanding how the business operates and working towards being able to complete telephone interviews for candidates.

The first week ended up being a busy week as the flu attempted to wipe out our Recruitment Team (luckily I survived!) It would mean that I would not have the much of the team with me to help me out. At first it seemed daunting but with the support of the rest of the team I managed to begin work on creating job vacancies for our website and to publish on social media as well as many other day to day responsibilities and tasks.

To add to the busyness, the Friday of my first week was the day of my graduation, which is an event to celebrate your achievement and the completion of higher education. A very proud day for me and gave me even more ambition to succeed in the role.

The most challenging obstacle I have faced in my first month was delivering a 50 minute presentation on interview tips to Sixth Formers at Hornsea School and Languages College. Although I have done presentations in the past, I had never delivered a presentation that had to last as long as this one. I spent plenty of time prepping the presentation and created a couple of activities to help keep the Sixth Formers engaged.

It was scary to do my first presentation but it was also a great learning curve for me, it’s already helped my confidence for when I deliver my next one. Alongside this it’s also taught me how to make it more engaging and interactive as I now know which sections of the presentations they preferred and which they didn’t. For my next presentation I will be making tweaks here and there as to make the experience more enjoyable for the next group I present to.

The learning and skills I’ve developed so far have increased dramatically, as I stated earlier my confidence and communication skills are already improving. Much of this has come through conducting telephone interviews with candidates and has helped me massively with phone calls.

My organisation skills again have benefited greatly as to be able to succeed in this role you have to plan in advance what you are wanting to do and when, without this nothing would get done in an effective manner, of which I am learning to do so very quickly.

To summarise my first month as an apprentice at HBTC, it’s been a very fun and a great learning experience so far. The skills I have already developed are helping me massively, and I can’t wait to enhance my skillset further.

If you want to become a Digital Marketing Apprentice like me, check out HBTC’s current digital marketing vacancies. Or, if you’re interested in the apprenticeship route and digital marketing is not for you, have a look at all the other vacancies HBTC has to offer including business administration, customer service, IT and teaching assistant.

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