Pondering my Placement
Working remotely was a new experience for many people recently. For my work placement at ProfileTree Coronavirus meant that their office was shut, and I was to do my placement remotely, with my only contact with the company in weekly check-up zoom meeting for any questions or issues. In this blog I aim to use Boud et al’s Model of self-reflection to review this experience of the world of remote working, its pit falls and advantages, to better myself as well as help you in this new world.
Explaining my Experience
So, for my placement with ProfileTree I was a video content creator, specifically for the company Connolly Cove which is a tourism advertising company. As such I was tasked with creating short tourism videos for Belfast or else where if there was somewhere in particular, I wanted to film.
They also told us about a marketing campaign that they were doing in Belfast called The Golden Mile, which is a walk-through Belfast with some tourist stops along the way as well as a map of Belfast and useful locations. I thought for my first video a good idea would be a time-lapse of me walking The Golden Mile and highlighting the different stops, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zlNbx71mJA. It was not a good idea. I had no equipment suited for this sort of walking time-lapse, the video was 5 minutes long after being sped up and was very hard to do reshoots for as required similar weather for a long portion of the day. Besides from these issues I and ProfileTree had different ideas on how the video should be edited together, which went back and forth multiple times, a lot of which meant I was waiting for responses so I could do editing or reshoots, not wanting to do work only to have to undo it. All in all, by the time I finally had it finished I noticed I was behind in hours and in how many videos I had done to others on the placement, the others making short 30 second videos of places. Seeing this I made several quick 30 second videos of key locations without much issue, however while this fixed the number of videos, I was still behind on hours with the Christmas holidays coming up. In one of our weekly zoom meetings, I asked if I could make videos of my hometown of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne as I knew the city much better and could make a lot of videos of it. They agreed and over the holidays I gathered enough footage to make several videos, which I edited together once I returned to university.
The Worries of Working Remotely
So, what went wrong? ‘Time – this is the biggest issue’ (Cunningham, Dawes and Bennett, pg 70), as previously mentioned it was just before the Christmas holidays, I noticed that my hours were behind others on the placement. To remedy this going forward I figured out how many hours a week I needed to work minimum to complete my placement on time, giving myself a timetable and deadlines. I also asked about making videos of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, knowing that I was much more familiar with it and could likely make a lot more videos from it. Luckily, they were interested so I made sure that I would be able to get all the footage I could want during my limited time in the holidays, planning to edit it when I returned so I could focus on filming. This worked well and helped me stay on topic and time, to which I realised that I could continue to make Newcastle videos until the end of my placement leading us onto the next issue with remote working, communication ‘The ability to communicate clearly and concisely to other human beings is a key skill set in any vocation’ (Herbert and Rothwell, pg 76). Unfortunately, I will admit this is the only time I addressed this issue during my placement, I asked whether they would prefer me to do more videos of elsewhere to diversify my portfolio as at that point it was a majority videos of Newcastle. In diversifying however with my limited remaining time, I would only be able to produce one or two more videos at most, which I thought they would prefer over an abundance of Newcastle videos. To my surprise they said to continue with my Newcastle videos showing the importance of communication and asking questions. Earlier in my placement there were many times especially during The Golden Mile video making where I was waiting on feedback or unsure what to do, in which I wasted time I could have been working by not chasing up the email.
Lessons Learnt
Looking back at this whole experience, going forward I will make sure to have a rigid work timetable, whether I am working remotely or in the office as this has shown me my work etiquette otherwise can be highly sporadic at best. It has also shown me the importance of not only asking questions as you may be surprised at the response, but also chasing up those answers as especially when working remotely an email can be lost, forgotten about or overlooked easily and leave you twiddling your thumbs waiting to hear back.
References
https://www.open.edu/openlearn/mod/oucontent/view.php?id=51386§ion=4– Accessed 8/03/2022
https://www.connollycove.com – Accessed 8/03/2022
https://profiletree.com – Accessed 8/03/2022
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-zlNbx71mJA – Accessed 8/03/2022
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