In this blog, I will detail a six-week work placement in which I completed 130 hours of work. Below, is the time sheet that was monitored by my work placement mentor, that details when these hours were completed. This time-sheet was based on my login times to the Google Meeting Room.
The first week of my placement with the Working Travel Group, included a virtual group training session on Monday morning. During this training session, I got to meet the other students who were participating in this internship. After being introduced to the internship by three supervisors, with a detailed PowerPoint, they ensured that we understood the full extent of the placement. Each intern was assigned a sheet detailing the hotels in which we had to research, this totaled approximately 65 hotels per intern. Below, I have inserted a screenshot of what each intern was faced with.
Following the initial induction day, I was expected to log in whenever I was free to do so. On the first day of content researching, I encountered some issues with the system that the Working Travel Group uses, the hotels that I was supposed to write about were not able to be accessed. In order to combat this issue, I utilised the live Google Meet in order to quickly communicate with the intern supervisors. The Google Meet was a highly effective tool throughout the internship, as it gave myself and the other interns direct access to the supervisors, which allowed for any issues to be resolved at a fast pace, allowing us to utilise our time productively.
The ease of use for Google Meet is expressed by Al-Maroof et al (2020), who discovered that the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the learning and working world, to advance quickly in terms of virtuality. This seemed especially prevalent whilst completing my work experience with the Working Travel Group, who have always been a predominantly virtual company even before the pandemic. Our supervisors expressed to us that they had recently made the switch to using Google Meet, as they reviewed all the predominant virtual working environments and concluded that Google Meet was the best for them to use.
After this initial setback, which was resolved quickly, I commenced with researching about the hotels, by adhering to the strict brief. Each hotel required extensive research, and we were tasked with ensuring that all of the information was factually correct, as well as being written with persuasion, in order to encourage people to travel to that certain hotel. After the completion of each hotel, I sent my work off for approval, and I would receive feedback within 48 hours for each hotel and, if needs be, make any improvements to my work.
After this feedback and any additional edits, that hotel would go live on the website. Within the first week, totalling just over 19 hours, I had only completed 6 hotels. This made me realise that I wasn’t managing my time effectively, and I had to alter my working habits in order to ensure that I was completing the task in good time. How I did this will be explored in the following blog post.
Hints and Tips: Make sure you monitor your timings, especially when completing work for other people. Ensure that you manage your time effectively, and constantly seek ways to improve if you are failing.
Megan Curbishley.
Reference List:
Al-Maroof, R., Salloum, S., Hassanien, A. and Shaalan, K., 2020. Fear from COVID-19 and technology adoption: the impact of Google Meet during Coronavirus pandemic. Interactive Learning Environments, pp.1-16.