A week in the life of a Marketing & Communications Apprentice

Hi, my name is Reece. I am an Apprentice Marketing and Communications Assistant at Garden House Hospice Care, having come from a background in construction and sales. After a year in these industries, I had an epiphany:

"What am I doing? Where do I want to be in life? While it paid well, could I sustain the lifestyle of waking up at 5am every morning and traveling for two hours to and from London, and could I keep up with the highly competitive sales environments?" The answer to these questions was simple: no.

I decided it was time to make a more sustainable and less physically taxing line of work. I thought about the skills I already possess and what I enjoyed studying most when I was at college, and I realised that marketing was perfect for the next steps in my career as it is a very diverse line of work where I would be doing something different every day and using my creative skills to do so. I happened across the job opening at Garden House Hospice Care for an apprentice position in marketing and immediately jumped at the opportunity and applied. The rest is history.

I learned very quickly that there is no such thing as a "typical week" in the marketing department as there is always something new to work on. Here is a snapshot of the work I’ve done this week:

Monday

• Grand reopening of the Hitchin Bancroft shop. The updated shop looked much better, with interesting items for sale and plentiful stock. I took photos, helped volunteers, and handed out flyers advertising Muddy Mayhem and a discount on all purchases in the shop throughout February.
• A few hours of admin, uploading photos, responding to emails and planning meetings.
• Delivered posters for Muddy Mayhem to supermarkets in Stevenage to be posted on boards for their customers.

Tuesday

• Proof-read four home clearance posters and confirmed they were coherent before publishing.
• Transcribed text from our Complimentary Therapy and other leaflets, ready to be updated in the future.

Wednesday

• Today was my study day, which consisted of reading and listening to learning materials.
• Completed this week's college task: to identify the internal relationships between the marketing department and the other departments in the organisation such as Finance, HR and Income Generation.

Thursday

• Recorded footage for my “day in the life” task, capturing my daily happenings and editing them into a short video with narration to be posted as a reel on the Garden House Hospice Care Instagram.
• Collected content, looking over my previous work this week for inspiration and thinking of creative ways to film, as well as collecting B-roll for us to use elsewhere.
• Edited the footage into a video around 30 seconds long in reel format.

Friday

• Updated the Garden House Hospice Care website by creating an event: "An Audience with Joe Calzaghe".
• Finished redesigning the Family Support Service leaflets as they were outdated with the old logos and placed my first professional printing order.
• Finished writing this "Week in the life" blog post.
• And finally, delivered posters to our shop on Fairfield Park on my way home.

A summary of my week as an apprentice

Looking back on the week, I’ve learned some new skills, including video editing and web development. Some of my favourite tasks this week included creating and editing the short video and collecting photos and videos of the new Hospice Bancroft shop.

Working at the Hospice as an Apprentice Marketing and Communications Assistant has been the single best job I’ve had in my career so far due to learning new skills almost every day. No two days are ever the same, making it very hard to get bored! I would like to thank Garden House Hospice Care for the career opportunity to gain a qualification in Marketing and Communications while gaining on-the-job experience.