Work experience at Salocin Group

This July, we welcomed two brilliant students for work experience. Technology evolves at the speed of light, and it’s no secret that young people pick it up quicker than any other cohort – so championing young people in tech is something we care about.

We’re completely inclusive when it comes to recruitment, but we were pretty pleased to see two girls interested in working with us.

According to Women in Data, women are still hugely under-represented across STEM fields, and the data industry is no exception – as things stand, male analysts and data scientists outnumber their female colleagues 4 to 1. So if we can encourage that to change – good.

Here are their experiences of working with us for a week!

Roisin

Hi, my name is Roisin, I am a 16-year-old, lower-sixth-form student. I take Psychology, Maths, and Religious Studies. I’m very interested in the psychological and philosophical behaviour of people, and how societal impacts influence actions.

My school requires a week of Year 12 work experience and I was lucky enough to have the chance to work here.

During my time here, I’ve been given the opportunity to work with real-life companies and help manage and categorise their data, while also learning the importance of profiling and making connections with other businesses.

Working here has helped me build industry-specific skills, such as data collection and storage, and understanding how profiling allows the company to push the most relevant ads to the right people. I’ve also developed transferable skills, including key IT credentials, email communication and teamworking. These will help me stand out as an employee and strengthen my university applications by demonstrating real-world experience.

I’ve mostly been working with organising data such as profiling, looking for contacts and confirming direct mail updates. I was also given the opportunity to talk to experts in their fields – such as Jess Coombs, who introduced me to working with prints and how they use different formats/styles of prints in advertisement. I also spoke to Lizzie Brooks about publications, and the importance of communication and promotion.

What surprised me the most about this work experience is how relevant it is to my interests and academic study. The use of statistics and collection of data relate to maths, and can help me understand real-world application for a topic that is mostly theoretical. This can enrich my understanding of the subject, as I can understand how exactly each topic can be implemented into the real world. The ‘people’ side of marketing can also be related to psychology and philosophy, as I can understand the cognitive processes of why certain ads work on certain people, and why targeting ads is so important to allow the right people to see them. It also, again, allows me to observe what I’ve learnt in theory demonstrated in the real world, which allows me to reinforce my learning and improve my subject knowledge.

Another surprising thing was the atmosphere of the experience. I had never worked in an office environment before, so I didn’t know what to expect about the office itself or the people. However, my experience has been beyond what I could have imagined. The office itself is clean and spacious, and every member of Salocin Group has been extremely welcoming and kind.

I am planning to go to university after sixth form, but I’m not sure what I want to do beyond that. This experience has opened my eyes to careers I hadn’t considered before, and I could definitely see myself exploring this opportunity further.

Overall, I very much enjoyed my experience working with Salocin Group/Join the Dots. I’ve learnt so much about the marketing business, and have developed so many extremely beneficial skills that will help me in the future, no matter what path I take.

Melania

Hi! My name is Melania, I’m currently in Year 10, studying for GCSEs and waiting for the results of my mock exams. My favourite subjects at the moment are History, Maths and Art. For the future, I am considering a career which connects computer science, tech and art.

I became interested in Salocin Group after hearing about them from my sister, who works here as a data scientist. I wanted to experience first-hand what it was like to work at a tech and AI company.

During my time here, I was lucky to speak to people from across the whole business – including data science and data engineering, client services, marketing technology, IT, marketing and communications, delivery, strategy, finance and HR. Everyone I spoke to was very kind and welcoming, and I enjoyed coming to the office each day. I also got to experience what it’s like to be a data analyst through building a dashboard in Microsoft PowerBI and learning how to query databases in SQL.

I particularly enjoyed the creative aspect of building a report and arranging elements to look nice on the page, choosing colours and visuals. The SQL training was based around solving a murder mystery by gathering information from a database. I got a bit stuck at times, but overall, it was fun.

One thing that surprised me was to find out that jobs like strategy, marketing and media planning involve using psychology to understand your clients. I didn’t expect that from a company dedicated to data and AI.

Doing this work experience placement has made me consider more different career paths beyond the one that drew me to Salocin Group in the first place.

I’d like to thank everyone who spent time with me during this week and told me about their roles!