My experience as a Career Ready Intern for Eden Scott
Eden Scott offers internships to school students through the Career Ready Programme. This programme allows young people to gain work experience and build their CVs. Here’s what my experience was like.
What is the Career Ready Programme?
Career Ready is a programme designed to bridge the gap between education and the world of work. This programme allows high school students aged 15-18 to gain real life work experience with a mentor through a paid four-week internship, sandwiched between an 18 month mentoring programme.
The aim of the programme is to prepare teenagers for work by developing their social skills and confidence and give them exposure to working in a professional environment.
Over the past four weeks I have spent my internship with Eden Scott and working here has been a memorable experience. Eden Scott has helped me build my confidence, enhance my CV and experience what working in an office is like. Working here has also made the thought of stepping into a working environment a lot less scary as the people here are extremely friendly and welcoming.
How is Eden Scott supporting the Career Ready Programme?
The staff here at Eden Scott welcomed me warmly and allowed me to learn about all the different sectors of recruitment and what recruiters do, as well as giving me the chance to understand all of the back-office support functions. This made me feel like I was a part of the Eden Scott community as I have sat on board meetings, team meetings and shadowing people across all areas of the business, working with their leadership team.
The environment has been incredibly supportive and I have felt comfortable asking questions and learning from the team - which highlights Eden Scott’s commitment to helping teenagers like me prepare for work.
What I worked on during my internship
During my internship here at Eden Scott on the Career Ready Programme, I have worked with many different people and departments. This allowed me to have gained valuable experience. I spent most of my time with the energy and infrastructure team as my mentor Iain Atkinson is the Director of this area. I supported them by researching the offshore wind sector in Scotland, identifying key people involved in the ScotWind leasing round. I also conducted research into people with senior positions in data development centres to support Stuart Mitchell.
Additionally, I have spent time with Ewan Anderson and the marketing team, writing, making and editing content for social media. I wrote this blog with the marketing team and learned how to publish it to the website and social channels. In my time with the marketing team, I have joined their regular meetings and also worked to compare Eden Scott’s website with other recruitment companies in Scotland.
I worked on a project for the operations team conducting an internal audit on our existing contractors ensuring that all of our contractors were fully compliant and all necessary documentation was in place from a GDPR and right to work perspective.
Additionally, during my time with the finance team I shadowed Ian Ross who manages our contractors and specifically payroll. I gained good insight into the wider finance sector from sitting in on team meetings. This coupled with the experience I have gained with marketing and the energy team has given me a broad understanding of how the recruitment sector works and being in a corporate environment has allowed me to develop my social skills and confidence.
What I learned from this experience
I have learnt during my internship that recruitment involves a lot of detailed researching. Working with the energy team on the offshore wind project, I learned that the team spends a lot of time researching companies, competitors and candidates to tailor their approach as much as possible and ensure they are connecting with the best companies to attract the best available talent.
Right now, I aspire to become a lawyer. My time writing blogs for the marketing team has allowed me to be creative and use a different type of writing style, which will be beneficial for a career in law. I worked a lot with Erin from the marketing team as she has just graduated from law at Edinburgh university. Working with her helped me boost my knowledge about law as she gave me lots of good insights about the legal world.
As part of gaining a better understanding of what a career in law could look like, Eden Scott set up meetings for me to meet with several lawyers from trainee level through to partner who work across corporate environment.
Working with the finance and marketing teams has allowed me to focus on problem solving, a skill which is particularly useful for lawyers as they regularly encounter challenges.
Working with adults in a corporate environment has allowed me to improve my social skills and build my confidence levels.
Conclusion
Overall, my experience with Eden Scott has been enjoyable and I believe I have really benefited from it.
This internship has helped me build new skills, develop my character and understand the working world. I truly recommend working with Eden Scot as they provided me with support and guidance throughout my time here, whilst giving me a clear insight into the world of work.
Across multiple practice areas within both the private and public sector. I think this has been useful for me as it has given me a greater insight into what lawyers do on a day-to-day basis as well as preparing me for how to get into law school.
