Digital Marketing Apprentice Review

I am a Digital Marketing Apprentice. My daily tasks are to handle the Microsoft Scotland social media pages, and I am currently working on social media plan for Scotland. My current project is planning a huge event for our partners and customers to celebrate Burns night, which takes place near the end of this month. My responsibilities for this include selling tables to our partners and encouraging my fellow colleagues to invite their customers. I also have to do all the "behind the scenes" work for the event. This involves making the presentation, writing the script, deciding the menus and layout of the room, as well as what guest speakers will be attending. I have spent a lot of time since I started my apprenticeship planning for this event, as it is the biggest even of the year for us at Microsoft Scotland.

I have attended external training with QA Apprenticeships where I gained more knowledge on the course i'm studying, and gained skills which i could bring back to the work place. These skills involve Search engine optimisation, analytics, social media marketing, email marketing and many more. I am going to continue to develop these skills throughout my 18 month apprenticeship. I have also gained a lot more confidence since starting in my role and have increased my level of communication skills.

I really enjoy my programme. I work in a great environment with a great team of people. I am surrounded with people in all sorts of sectors and teams, which makes the office always a really interesting environment where i'm always learning new things. Everyone in the workplace is extremely helpful and have treated me as part of the team. The only thing i dislike about the programme is that i feel it may not be challenging enough for me and I feel I would benefit more from working at a higher level.

Internally, i feel incredibly valued by Microsoft. My manager and my colleagues around me show appreciation towards me and recognise the effort i put into my work and everything i do. They always offer me help and make sure i'm comfortable with what my tasks are before i start.

I feel like my training providers could have been a lot more organised with the onboarding process, as i was asked to send over the same four documents four times before beginning, which i found extremely frustrating. Since then i've had no problems at all and enjoy my programme, as my assessor is great at teaching and helping all her learners. The programme is organised well as i now have every unit i will need to complete on my online account. They also have all their training courses planned well in advance, so as not to disrupt your work schedule.

I receive a lot of support from my training provider. My particular assessor is great and always responds to any questions/queries immediately, even with the busy lifestyle she has! I always understand the help she gives me and the training courses she has provided so far have been very helpful to me for my coursework as well as knowledge to bring back to the workplace.

I receive a good amount of support from my employer. My line manager is always with me as we are the only two Scottish based in our team, meaning we work together most of the time. She is always there if i ever need to ask questions and we have weekly 1:1's to go over my course work and any tasks we've been doing throughout the week.

My salary meets my living costs well, as i am currently living at home with my parents, and paying them weekly for "rent". As my work is in the centre of town it is easier for me to take a bus rather than drive to work, making my travel costs very low, which fits in well with my salary. Overall, i feel happy with my annual wage for my age, and only after finishing my apprenticeship would i want to increase the salary i am earning.

With my role in the company it involves getting involved in a lot of events. This gives me opportunities outside of work to gain experience and build my social network. We also often do offsites which i think are great ways to engage with your team on an informal level.

Yes

I would recommend Microsoft to a friend as it really is a great place to work with loads of exciting opportunities. It is an amazing experience and is definitely something you will gain benefits from when going into a further career in the future.

For others applying to Microsoft, if they were looking for an Apprenticeship i would definitely recommend they applied through QA Apprenticeships. I would like to remind them that the onboarding process at Microsoft is extremely slow, as it is a big company and it takes time to get to grips with all the information you need to know.