Radiator is committed to nurturing new graduate talent with Talent Scotland
Radiator is committed to nurturing new graduate talent and has collaborated with TalentScotland Graduate Placement Programme to ensure graduates get a head start in their career. I’m thankful they did as it has given me my first essential experience in a professional working environment.
In a shaky financial climate where experience is a necessity for many job applications, graduates are faced with significant challenges when taking their first steps into the working world. TalentScotland is assisting graduates to overcome these challenges by placing graduates into intelligent Scottish businesses. Intelligent, because these companies appreciate the potential that new graduates can bring to their organisation.
I can empathize with many students who are in their final year of University study - not knowing what to do next and having no professional working experience. It’s far too easy to get caught up in your final year projects and lose vision for potential job opportunities. I found that keeping an eye on job openings listed on TalentScotland was the best way to keep on top of local graduate job openings.
What I’ve found is that you won’t be placed in the typical ‘intern’ type job where you make coffee, file paperwork and answer the phone. You become a genuine and valuable part of the workforce, taking on real live projects, dealing with potential and existing clients and managing your own workload. Not all at once, of course! Although everyone’s experiences will differ, my first few days were spent learning about Radiator and getting used to how they work; gradually building up my responsibilities and workload as the weeks progressed.
There is no typical working day here, so I’ll describe my day today. I arrive at the office at 8.50am which gives me enough time to check some web related news and see how much traffic my blog posts got the day before.
- 9am – Time to check my inbox and deal with any urgent issues from clients or enquiries from potential clients and catch up with the rest of team with regards to project progress. I then review the progress of existing projects and prioritise what has to been done first. Today, for example, the first project on the agenda is to continue a website review for a potential client. This involves looking at every aspect of the client’s current online presence as well as their offline business. Due to the level of detail that we analyse a client’s site this can take several hours but the results are particularly beneficial as it shows the client where they are faltering online and where we can substantially improve it.
- 11am – A request for a free SEO audit has come in through the site. I prepare to analyse the site with the keywords provided by the enquirer. Depending on how many keywords the potential client has provided, determines how long this takes.
- 12pm – Lunch time/read more web related news/colleague banter!
- 1pm – Back to the website review and making a start on writing the accompanying report.
- 3pm – Website migration. Often clients have existing content on their old sites they wish to integrate into the new site. This can also include setting up URLs to catch SEO traffic where the last site was receiving and setting up other crucial SEO related information, such as metadata.
- 5pm - A once empty new website has been filled up with content and is taking shape. I continue with the web review and write down my schedule for the remainder of the week.
- 5.30pm – Time to head home.
Your experiences will differ enormously from mine, especially if you’re going into a different industry but I hope this gives you some idea of what Talent Scotland can offer graduates. Just go for it and apply. If you have any questions please comment below or if you’d prefer to talk privately you can email me: scott@the-radiator.com
Thanks for reading,
Scott.
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