Ben: Guest Blog post – “My Work Experience”

Last week we were joined by Ben, a year 10 student from a Cams Hill Secondary School in Fareham. Ben joined us during a busy admin and marketing week as we were organising our annual mail-out for Open Studios.

Having an extra pair of hands during the week was incredibly helpful as Making Space is a small team of mainly part time staff. Ben’s work placement took place after our Spring Season had finished meaning there weren’t any workshops, but over the course of the week, working with Ami, Kate and Lynne, we were able to offer Ben a realistic insight into the world of work. Ben’s help in getting the mail-out organised and distributed on time was fantastic and made a huge difference to the organisation.

Ben was also really interested in how Making Space could help him gain his Bronze Art Award and we spent lots of time discussing how he could use the resident artists and the teams expertise’s to help him complete various parts of his award. Lynne also was able to look over Ben’s portfolio and provide feedback.

We asked Ben to write a short piece about his experience with us:

“I just did my work experience at Making Space for a week; and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Everybody was very welcoming and friendly which was good because I was unsure at first.

Despite choosing Making Space for my work experience based on the proposed chance for bettering my understanding of the arts and crafts (e.g. shadowing artists, helping with classes and talking to clients) it has instead prepared me with the knowledge of admin affairs, as this was what I was mainly tasked with for the week.

I have learnt skills in admin whilst here at Making Space, which will be beneficial for the future. The jobs I was tasked with are not something that I would normally do, but having now done them I can honestly say that it was an eye-opening experience. When I was with the team in the office I always felt very welcomed by the staff: they were warm, engaging, interesting and chatting whilst working was fun.

In conclusion, I enjoyed myself and felt that I have gained a lot from this experience which I can carry with me through to the future.

During my time here at Making Space, I have learnt a number of skills, including:

• An appreciation of the necessary admin involved in company like this.
• What goes into planning large scale arts events.
• How an arts and crafts charity is run.
• What is involved with organisations like this.
• An appreciation of what goes on in the day of an artist.

Here are some of the tasks I undertook during my work experience:

• Induction
• Admin filing and updating artist files
• Proofing marketing material
• Updating Mailchimp contact lists
• Helping set up studio spaces appropriately and assisting with a visit from a journalist and photographer from The News
• Labelling envelopes for Mail-out
• Assisting the administrator with invoices & letters for tenants. Delivering them to artist studios, meeting them if present.
• Organising and compiling bundles of flyers using a marketing distribution plan to send out to various community venues.
• Creating and delivering bundles of 100 x Open Studio flyers to the Making Space tenants.
• Stuffing envelopes which I had also labelled, with the corresponding amounts of leaflets using marketing distribution plan as a guide.
• Compiling workshop customer feedback forms onto an excel spreadsheet
• Helping to deliver bundles of Marketing Material out around the Leigh Park community venues.”

If you are a young person interested in doing your Work Experience with Making Space please visit this page of the website and get in touch for more information.

Please bear in mind each work experience young person will have a different experience with us depending on when their time falls and what we have booked in.

You can search back through previous works experience blog posts to see what other people got up to.

A huge thanks to Ben for all your hard work and we hope to see you soon as you begin your Arts Award Journey!