Delighted to Offer Work Experience to Students

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Ryan, an A-Level student at Overton Grange School, spent a week shadowing our team at our offices in Woking.  He shares his experience in his blog here.

My name is Ryan and in this past week I have come to ai for Work Experience. I’m 17 and I study 3 A-levels (Economics, Psychology and Business) at Overton Grange. After sixth form, I aim to study Economics at University and build a career around it.

I was interested in doing work experience at ai because it was a well-established organisation and I was drawn to the chance to come into the office and shadow what everyone does on a day-to-day basis.

Throughout the week, I had many opportunities to speak to different sectors of the company. It was great to see how many departments there are in such a company. The number of jobs there are, was astonishing. My aim was to gain as much knowledge and see ways employees work around the company and use skills learnt from all the shadowing for future experiences. In five days, I shadowed five departments: with Steve, Kirsty, Pocky, Cat and Sarah as well as working with Helana. It was enjoyable to see employees collaborate, communicate and tackle challenges.

I enjoyed the chance to help out with the alert management team and have the responsibility to determine whether there had been fraudulent activity detected or not. It was an exciting experience to put my skills to the test and see the trends from company activities. I can see why they enjoy their job as they like the feeling of being responsible, kind of like a detective.

Furthermore, it was a great chance to help Sarah in Marketing and help her improve the design of ai’s website and compare what ai do differently to its competitors. It was an excellent opportunity to develop my design abilities and most certainly my Excel skills. It was a fine morning as my preference of subject is Economics/ Business so I had some idea of what is needed to be achieved in this department.

Using this week at ai, I have gained valuable insights into the real world working life and will definitely use problem-solving and decision-making skills learnt this week into my educational life. What surprised me this week was that there are only just over 100 employees that work at ai. The size of the office certainly does not feel that way.

Overall, it was a great opportunity to experience what it’s like to work at ai and maybe one day I will work here. But as of now, I am aiming to study Economics at University.