Work Placements – Feedback from a Placement Provider

G5 Technologies Ltd is based in Westhill and has been providing high quality IT business solutions since 2004. For the past few years, the company has offered work placements to pupils from nearby Westhill Academy through the Aberdeenshire Council Apprenticeship scheme. In November 2018 we welcomed S4 pupil Harry.

Harry’s placement supervisor was Carol Imray, who was impressed with Harry during his week-long work experience.

Carol had this to say:

“Being a relatively small company, we do not have a specific work and learning plan for these placements, and it ends up being very much dependent on the workload and team available at the time but Harry took all of this in his stride.
We were able to offer him a variety of roles which provided an insight into the services which we’re able to offer. He kept a log of his time throughout the week on our helpdesk system just like our engineers do and completed a variety of IT tasks including:
• Onsite visit to a customer site to identify available ports and patch in additional office phones.
• Onsite visit to student accommodation to identify networking Wi-Fi hardware and to take photos for updating company documentation.
• Conducting a Wi-Fi heat map survey to check for signal strength.
• Helping to prepare multiple access points for a hardware upgrade.
• Securely wiping old staff PC drives ready for disposal.
• Checking incoming stock and assembling a new PC according to build sheet plan from a client.
• Configuring a router with correct IP address for a new broadband line at a client site which was then delivered to the site.
• Working through “tickets” in the helpdesk and emailing customers for and with updates directly.
• Looking at the design process for our website and integrating social media for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Harry’s knowledge of I.T. is very good and his communication skills are excellent, and he fitted in well with the team here. He coped well with working on his own but also having to assist colleagues with something else at short notice.
Following his placement, Harry contacted us to say how much his enjoyed his time with us and to thank everyone for the time which they took to spent with him.
It was a pleasure to have a young person who worked so well with us all and understood very quickly the work that we do.”