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Insight Create Perform
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Insight Create Perform
With two-thirds of employers now looking for graduates with relevant work experience, gaining an insight into the world of work before leaving college or university can be instrumental in graduates’ future employability. Every year, we welcome a number of students into the studio (both virtually and in-person, again) to get a LITTLE taste of agency life. Most recently, Luke, a Creative Advertising Student, joined us for a few weeks. Spending time with our Design and Performance Teams, he wanted a holistic overview of working in an agency to help him decide where to carve the path for his career. As he came to the end of his time with us, we asked him to write a blog about his experience:
After completing my work experience at LITTLE, I can see why work experience can be such an important factor in a potential employer’s mind. From the inner workings of a marketing agency to design and account management, I’ve learnt a lot over the past few weeks. An insane amount, in fact.
When I started to look for work experience, I knew I was interested in advertising and marketing but wasn’t sure which part of the industry interested me. I thought it would take me forever to figure out which career path I wanted to follow, and could easily spend half a year at various agencies, trying my hand at different things.
Luckily when I reached out to LITTLE, and mentioned that I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to try, Sam suggested that I could try different things each week – which proved to be the perfect opportunity for me to figure out what I enjoyed most. So, needless to say, I was very excited to come into the studio and start my work experience.
When I was looking for work experience, I wasn’t trying to put something on my CV to look good, I was looking to understand how things are done in the industry and find what actually sparked my interest! While I may have been originally looking for work experience based on these factors, I also discovered a whole host of other benefits to the experience, such as…
Apart from the fact it looks good on your CV, I think most people go into their work experience to get a feel for working, testing their interests, and finding out if they can actually do the job they want to do for eight hours a day.
I can say (at least at LITTLE), that work experience has been a great way for me to figure these things out. I gained a great understanding of what a career in design or marketing could look like.
And, if you don’t like it… well at least you know now, and not in five years.
If you love what you’re doing at your work experience, the drive and motivation it gives you is amazing.
After leaving LITTLE on the first day I was buzzing with energy on the walk back and I was so excited for the next day.
LukeThere are so many websites, programs and terms I didn’t know when starting my work experience, but a little encouragement can go a long way. All throughout my time at LITTLE, I learnt so much from the team saying “Hey, give this a try! It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect.”
Work experience not only teaches you these things but also gives you the extra insight on what you need to go away and learn to succeed in your future career, too.
The last time I was in a scrum I was on a cold, muddy field with a gum shield in my mouth playing rugby, luckily this wasn’t the case when people say “scrum” in LITTLE.
During my work experience, there were many industry and workplace practices I learnt just from sitting at a desk and observing the environment around me.
On my first day at LITTLE I went to the wrong door and somebody had to come collect me as I didn’t know how to get to the floor that they worked on.
Doing work experience gets you over that nervous barrier and going into a workplace environment becomes a lot less scary after you’ve been in it.
Anyway, that’s quite enough of that. Onto my work experience, experience!
When first coming to LITTLE (after finding the door) I went into the agency knowing I was doing something around design – but I wasn’t 100% sure what I would be doing that day.
After sitting down, I was briefed on my first task: a branding exercise. I would be creating a brand for an executive search firm – from the logo to advertisements and collateral. Although I didn’t know what I was going to be doing that day, I did not expect it to be doing an actual brief!
From the start, I was very excited, and started experimenting with ideas immediately. From creating a mood board to sketching ideas in my notebook to actually creating the logo in Adobe software, I was so happy to be doing the practical work that comes with a career in design.
After finalising a logo and picking my colour palette for the brand, I expanded into other parts of branding such as typography, patterns and online presence. When creating these I could literally see my ideas coming to life as part of the brand.
The day was jam-packed, and I felt like I was in my element the whole time. I was very excited for what was to come with the rest of my time at LITTLE.
Before coming to LITTLE, I knew that Adobe XD was a part of Adobe Creative Cloud, and that was about it. I had no idea about – to be honest, I didn’t even know what UX was, let alone how it impacted everyday life.
On my second day, I was guided through the program, as well as the general terms and elements that form web design in general. I found this all very interesting. My task for the day was to create a login page for a company’s website on mobile and tablet, including a sign-up page and a forgotten password page.
After a while, I found the program was similar to Photoshop, and started to get-to-grips with Adobe XD as a whole. Throughout the day Ben gave me feedback on how to improve the webpage for user experience, considering things such as font size, colours and formatting.
By the end of the day, I had made a login page with sign up and forgotten password pages, I had also made a contact page and made all buttons on the website interactable (Menu, Google, Facebook).
This week was dedicated to learning the importance of SEO and creating a blog from start to finish.
It’s safe to say that I had no experience with SEO, apart from a 45-minute course I’d previously done. I knew what it was, but it definitely wasn’t in-depth. This did not matter though as, just like the week before, Dave guided me through the task and gave me feedback about the things I could improve.
For the blog, I had to choose a concept that was relevant to the client (a chain of garages), so we settled on the increasing popularity of electric vehicles. Then, it was time for research – two hours of getting clued up on fuel prices, the benefits of electric cars, and trending news articles. After finding my keywords, and planning the structure of my blog, I started writing (keeping my SEO keywords as reference the whole time).
Before I knew it, my last week was here – and it was all about email marketing.
My first task was to design an email for LITTLE for a target audience of people who hadn’t heard of LITTLE before.
Firstly, I gathered inspiration and ideas from other email campaigns and then researched recent trends in email marketing. From this, I made a list of ideas that I wanted to incorporate into my email design and then went on to actually designing it.
When designing, I incorporated patterns, wording and graphics from the LITTLE brand so it was easily recognisable. I had an opening section, a section explaining who LITTLE were and a part dedicated to their blog. I also created a dark mode version, as I know many people have their phones in dark mode, and it doesn’t look as professional when an email only looks good in light mode.
My final task took into consideration everything I’d learnt over my time at LITTLE. I was briefed on creating a marketing campaign for a new outdoor gym. I would be creating a launch plan for the opening month, including a bespoke email design, organic social posts, and other collateral, like posters.
I found inspiration in bold, vivid gym posters, and decided I wanted to combine this look with encouraging, uplifting language that would be more suited to the gym’s target audience (people working in its local area). The graphics I created were inspired by Nike’s Run Club App, with their use of bold shades and contrast.
I found all of these tasks very fun to do, it was like I was combining everything I had learnt from the past few weeks into a final project!
These past few weeks have been amazing to fully engulf myself in the world of marketing.
I have learnt so much doing tasks every day, listening to what’s happening in the office and the feedback I have been given. I cannot recommend this work experience enough to anyone thinking about going into marketing, you truly dive headfirst into the industry.
Just remember to take the lift, not the stairs.
Why not email hello@little.agency or call 0113 828 0000 to find out how we can help you to transform your content marketing.
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