3rd Blog post
Originally, my work placement was at the radio station Juice 1038 but a lot of problems arose whilst I was working with them. I was due to begin my placement at the beginning of the year, but it became clear that I was going to have difficulty contacting the manager. Although they had employed me at the beginning of the year and had discuss coming in on Fridays to begin my placement, Shane (who was the manager and CEO of Juice 1038) was very inconsistent in his messages and replies. I had tried to organise with him when and where I would come in to start my placement but on many of these occasions, he ignored my messages. He failed to get to me on several occasions after I had asked which days I should come. This went on over a period of several months before I decided to change my placement.
Although I had secured my placement and had done my interview by the end of September which was the beginning of the module, Shane had fallen sick during November. Before this I had gone in to discuss my placement with Shane a handful of times and had been into the office once, but still had no official start to my placement due to the lack of consistent communication from Shane. With the news that he had fallen sick during November, this made my situation much more difficult as the next time I had heard from Shane was during December, which was already the end of my first semester, meaning I would only have one semester to complete my placement hours.
Due to this by February I had still not properly started my placement, which was becoming a worry to me.
I found this interaction between Shane very difficult as, he had originally hired me and was supposed to be leading my placement within Juice. But as he failed to answer my messages so many times, organising to come in and to complete my placement was starting to become stressful as he was very inconsistent with the way he contacted me. Therefore, I found it would be best to change my placement.
During February I thought it would be best to completely change my placement to a new company as I wasn’t getting very far with Juice 1038 and I had to complete 100 hours by the end of the semester which was looking difficult during that time as I hadn’t completed any hours yet.
During February I changed my placement to working with ACA Models. This is a modelling agency within Northern Ireland. Although I had wanted to work on a radio station, that wasn’t working out for me, and I hadn’t started working there yet so I gad not gained any skills. Therefore, I thought it would be okay to completely change the type of placement I was in rather than go for another placement on a radio station. I was also finding it hard to find another radio station placement that late within the year. Therefore, as an aspiring model I applied to start working within ACA Models.
The aim of this placement was to form a model portfolio, promote and gain clients to work with, and to understand how the model business works within the office. This placement was much easier already than my placement at Juice 1038 as the communication between myself and ACA was more frequent, and they consistently asked me to come in to complete my placement with them.
My role within this placement was to search for potential clients. With this I was able to develop my own portfolio within modelling and was able to push and promote my own modelling portfolio with clients. This worked out well for me as I was able to get more jobs and learn how to gather more work within the modelling industry. The most challenging part of this placement was that I had to consistently be in to complete the 100 hours and work in the office at ACA. This was a challenge as I was only able to change to this placement at the end of February, and therefore with the end of the placement module near, I had to complete 100 hours in a very short period. Therefore, when I went in to work with ACA the hours were very long.
Overall, from my experience with Juice 1038 I learned that some communications between companies may be hard, and if I was in a similar situation again, I would be sure to change placement earlier. I found that being consistent in contacting companies may still not help the situation, as I continued to try to contact Shane about my placement but didn’t get any reply the majority of the time. One of my main problems with the placement art Juice 1038 was that Shane was my only source of contact as he was the highest person who worked there, therefore I couldn’t contact anyone else to get throughout to Shane, and therefore with my consistency I felt like I had done all that I could.
Although I consistently used my communication skills when contacting Juice 1038 and trying to get my placement started, I felt it was best to change placement completely. But, because of the time scales, when I changed placement, I only had a short period of time to complete the 100 hours, which would’ve been easier if I had the full year to complete my placement, but as I had limited time, I had to do a lot of hours within a short period of time. I feel that I may have left the changing of the placement too far into the year and should have changed it by the end of the first semester.
