marketing apprentice Review

Currently based in NOW, In the digi trading team, I am responsible for creative production for Paid Social, Display, Programmatic and Discovery. I manage relationships with creative and media agencies, and ensure paid social activity goes live and monitor the results.

Yes I have skills in creative production, briefing, managing relationships, paid social activity including channel, platform and placement knowledge, and have gained skills in Excel, Figma design, Bright Analytics data analysis platform and Mparticle audience builder.

I enjoy the role although the workload is a lot to manage, the apprenticeship work takes time from my day-to-day role and I feel sometimes the course lessons can be repetitive as they are all zoom calls. The work we must complete to pass, in our portfolio, is outside of our normal job roles, so it can be challenging to gain the resource to be able to complete these tasks.

The apprenticeship course is flexible in that there are rough deadlines, but you can essentially finish the course when you want to, when you have completed the exams and portfolio work. Within the business, there are people you can contact for help, my manager is understanding with apprenticeship work, however it can be challenging to find that balance when given lots of responsibility, I find it difficult to find time to reach out to other areas in marketing to learn about them, as time/resource is limited in my area. We did not know our first rotation area until the weekend before we joined the business, and it will be the same when we rotate, it would be useful to get more knowledge on this sooner, as it can give us insight to our futures at the business.

There are points of contact and my team is considerate towards my apprenticeship time, however there could be more communication initially about how the programme works/giving a long term view of the apprenticeship and what is expected from you.

My coach was really helpful with advice, as he had experience coaching previous apprentices from the same business, e.g. he knew how we could do certain implementation projects, for some it would be much harder to achieve within their company. The multiverse platform has lots of resources that really help when making your portfolio and revising for exams.

I think the majority of my learning has come from being in my role so far, and apprenticeship lessons cement this. Sometimes it is difficult for lessons/tools/information to be relevant to the whole cohort in their own business, we often have breakout rooms in our lessons and it can be insightful to learn about other business.

I am part of the social committee which is joint between a few teams, we organise activities such as afternoon tea, quizzes and drinks. We also took part in a Sky Cares beach clean which was really fun and insightful. Sky also has a marketing excellence programme, where marketeers get to go to partners events e.g. Snapchat, Tiktok, Hearst, Global, and learn about the marketing services they offer and gain insights to their platforms/channels, it is also a great way to network.

Yes

As it is such a huge business, there are so many opportunities for development and progression within many fields/products the business offers. You get to meet amazing people, partners ect and the networking/social side is great. The culture is caring for employees and there are always events for learning and development going on.

Be as open and as friendly as possible, show them your personality as the rest you are supposed to learn, as long as you work hard, you will go far! Be open to all the opportunities and make as many connections as possible, and remember as an apprentice you have protected time, remeber you can set boundaries and be proactive/strict in your time management.