It’s On – A Week of Work Experience with Aiimi

A few weeks ago I published an article talking about the It’s On project. As previously mentioned Aiimi is collaborating with Southwark Council and four schools in the borough to create an online portal called It’s On. It’s On will provide intelligence and analysis regarding the local activities young people are involved in. Since that time, the website portal which we are developing has progressed greatly. We also had two students, Bobbi and Dana from the It’s On project, working with us last week as part of a student placement programme. Over the course of that week we asked them to help us in developing, testing, and fine-tuning our reports and website. On their last day I asked the two girls to write a short blog for me so that I could share with you guys some of the amazing work they did.

Before we get to their blog, here’s an extract adapted from the official press release of the council:

Aiimi has been working with Southwark council and four local schools to create a project where pupils can benefit from professional expertise to develop their own IT skills in a real business environment.

Twelve pupils from four Southwark schools – St Saviour’s and St Olave’s, Walworth Academy, Sacred Heart and St Michael’s College – have spent the last year working with experts from the IT company to develop the ‘It’s On’ project – a web based data intelligence and reporting tool.  

Pupils set up a fictitious company and developed an online survey to rate the activities promoted on the council’s youth service website, whtvr.org.  The survey was rolled out to over 800 young people in Southwark and the final product will be launched at a special event at Canada Water Library in October.

Steve Salvin, Managing Director at Aiimi, said: “It’s been a great year and I’ve regularly been amazed by the high standard of work the students have produced. Our staff have also enjoyed being able to go into schools and share their expertise and knowledge.  The IT industry is one of the only industries still experiencing growth and we feel it is really important to nurture these skills within the local community”

It is important to Aiimi to use our business expertise through our CSR programme. We hope that the It’s On project as well was the work placement programme will illustrate to other organisations the amazing things that can be achieved through working with young people.  We share with them our business experience and knowledge in a fun way and they share their ideas and immense creativity. We know the young people have had a really positive effect on the Aiimi team and we hope Aiimi have been a positive influence on the young people we have worked with.

Aiimi Work Experience Blog

We applied for the work experience with Aiimi after working with them for several months to develop a web-based application informing the youth of Southwark about activities in the area with 10 of our peers from four different schools in Southwark. We were all offered the chance to work with Aiimi for four days at the end of august; however there were only two places available so we just simply had to apply by sending an email to an Aiimi colleague. Within the email, we had to write a biography of ourselves, including relevant contact information, why we would like to work to for Aiimi and what our favourite type of biscuit was and why. Within two days, it was revealed that both of us had impressed the Aiimi Colleague who we had sent our application to and we were officially offered a place.

On the first day of our work experience we had a brief introduction of the four day placement and a tour of the office that we would be working in for the next four days. We were then told that we would be writing tests scripts to test the It’s On reports, this consisted of an area report, school report, activity report and a respondents report. Once we both finished writing up test scripts for the It’s On reports, we carried out our testing for the It’s On reports and found some errors and lack of information in some parts, so they were then fixed.

On the second day of our work experience we worked on producing a page on the It’s On website about the project. One of us worked on writing a brief summary of what we did in each of the sessions, this included writing about the different stages of the design, development process of the website and what kind of skills we had acquired along the process. Meanwhile the other worked on writing up the objectives for the project, the team and some individual objectives from our fellow peers. These objectives were what we set out to achieve along the course of the project, for example some simple ones were to work well as a team and use time management to complete our project to a deadline.

On the third we were asked to create a presentation on our social media project: ‘finding stars’ for the last two days, seeing as Aiimi have a graduate programme and recognise that they need to get better at attracting and recruiting graduates by using social media as they currently do not utilise social media to recruit graduates, consequently meaning that they miss out on a large proportion of talented young people who would be a great asset to Aiimi. Our presentation included sections on: how and what we researched; what our research shows – what Aiimi is doing right/ wrong; our recommendations and how Aiimi can achieve our recommendations and a case study of a company who we think are using social media successfully to recruit graduates.

We found this work experience is very beneficial to us as we developed our knowledge on different aspects and it was very enjoyable as all the Aiimi colleagues were willing to help and welcoming. We would like to thank Aiimi for a pleasant four days’ work.

Written by Dana Nurse and Bobbi-Michelle

Favourite Biscuit and Why?

 My favourite biscuit – Chocolate Hobnobs.

I enjoy these as they are great for dunking whether it is a good cup of tea or a mug of coffee. You can rely on them not to crumble in the process, like I would not crumble under pressure. I like the fact that the oats provide a deceptive healthy treat until you turn it around and there’s chocolate.

–          Bobbi

My favourite biscuit is a Cornish Fairing, this is because they are very brittle similar gingerbread and consequently easy to chew. Cornish fairings are also quite saccharine due syrup being a main ingredient but also at the same time slightly spicy due to the ginger and spice in it, but not too much to falter the taste.

–          Dana

I would like to thank Bobbi and Dana for taking the time and effort to write a blog article for Aiimi and would also like to thank Ben Sprague and Russell Collins for their input into this article!

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