Every year we work with Sunderland College to give students the chance to get some hands-on experience in the world of digital marketing. Things are a little different this year because we’re all working remotely full time, including Ben, our intern.
We asked Ben to give you all a little insight to what’s it’s like to be a CX intern working from home.
Hi, my name is Ben. I’m a college student studying creative media and as part of my work experience I am joining CX marketing as an intern until July next year. I chose CX for my work experience because in college I enjoy the units based around advertising and I thought it would be useful and interesting to get an inside look on how marketing works, and so far it’s been great!
9am: The first thing I do every Wednesday is join a Zoom call to go over last week’s work and figure out what I’m meant to be doing today. This usually lasts around 15-30 minutes before I jump straight into the work.
9:30-11:30am: After the Zoom call, I’ll begin doing the research for the task I’ve been assigned that day.
So far this has included things like social media trends, competitor research, lockdown content and social media posts. I usually spend around an hour doing this, depending on the task.
One of the main challenges doing research has been figuring out how to adapt to platforms I’m unfamiliar with when attempting to write social media posts for CX or their clients, such as LinkedIn and Facebook which I very rarely use for personal use. Research normally isn’t a problem for me though because I am supplied with all the resources I need and I usually pick up on it quite fast.
12pm: We’ll have another Zoom call to catch up and go through the research that I’ve done so far.
I always use this time to ask any questions if I’m confused on something or struggling but I’ll always prepare something to show in that call to sum up what I’ve been doing for the last few hours, even if it’s just brief or incomplete.
These calls are really helpful for me because it sort of keeps me on the right tracks and if I’ve done something wrong or misunderstood something, it’s a lot better to fix it at this point in the day rather than finding out after I’ve finished.
12:30pm: After the call, I usually take a break for lunch. Sometimes I even take a lunch break before the call if I’m comfortable with the research I’ve done up until that point.
At CX I have the flexibility to take breaks whenever I like which keeps me responsible for my own time which overall helps me to improve my time management skills. It’s nice to have the freedom of taking my own breaks because they allow me to take a minute to relax before going back to my work which actually results in me producing the best work I can.
1pm: At this point I’m always onto the blog writing part of the task which honestly I really enjoy. Sometimes it can be challenging to always match CX’s tone in text, my first time writing a blog for CX I made a few mistakes when attempting to match their tone but I think now I’m getting the hang of it.
