Despite only spending a short amount of time at Visyon over the past couple of months (2 hours every Wednesday afternoon), I feel as if the work that I have done has been valuable and helped me to develop the critical skills that are important in a workplace environment. The things that I have done have ranged from the usual things that you would expect such as social media outreach to more unusual tasks such as cooking. Other stranger things that I have helped with included sticking asset tags on all of the pieces of furniture and technology; something that sounds simple until you realise how big Visyon actually is and how many people work here. You don’t know how awkward it is to have to interrupt somebody so that you can tag a chair that they are sitting on, or the computer that they are trying to use.
Before I started to help here I had a vague idea of what Visyon did, but no clue as to what I would be doing for work experience; it’s not like I can help young people with their mental health issues. I’m not trained! I would probably end up hindering more than helping. I suppose I thought I would be collecting tea and coffee for the busy workers. What I have actually ended up doing has been a lot more enjoyable and different than that (emphasis on different). For my first time helping out I wrote a rota to organise the kitchen cleaning and organising. This included daily jobs, weekly jobs and monthly jobs that ranged from wiping everything in the kitchen down to washing all of the plates in the cupboard. The following two weeks were the weeks where I tagged everything, it doesn’t take as long as you might think.
After a while you end up getting into a rhythm and start tagging furniture at super speed. Plus I had a cooking break where I tested out a recipe for the primary school booklets.
The next task I completed was the “boring” one, although that’s not how I would describe it. It consisted of counting out booklets into piles of 25, with the direction that they were facing changing every 5 booklets. I know that it sounds tedious but you end up going onto autopilot and actually have some time to think -something that is increasingly difficult in today’s world- I (willingly) stayed until half 4 that week and only ended up doing half of the boxes that they had. They just didn’t seem to end! While other people may have complained about being asked to do this task, I didn’t mind. I knew that by doing it I could end up helping somebody (even if that somebody was Sandi, who would have been the one counting them out otherwise).
The following week I got to go and deliver some of those booklets with Sandi. The 4 schools that we went to were so remote that I was surprised when I found out that over 100 students attended each of them. Unfortunately, by this point the booklets that I had counted out the previous week were long gone and the boxes didn’t have the same amount in them, so some guesswork was involved.
Last week was half-term. I could have spent the afternoon at home, moping about, but I decided to come and help because getting this experience is more important than watching TV or playing video games, both of which are things that I can do any time. That was the week that I completed some social media outreach. It was on Facebook and on Twitter, I had to do some fake outreach for my ICT course and now I fear that I didn’t put enough value on the power of the hashtag. You have to #Hashtag #Every #Important #Word #To #Get #Those #Views. All joking aside, the social media outreach is important and as much as I hate #Hashtags I now understand their value more.
I’m looking forward to the rest of my time helping at Visyon. I don’t know how long it will be for but I’m going to make sure to value all of it. The people here are some of the nicest people I have ever met, so I’ll take any opportunity to help them out.