My week at Nexer, by Owen
Sales, Marketing and Events Manager
2 minute read
Student Owen has written us a blog post, sharing what he's been up to during a week of work experience at our Macclesfield office.
We were delighted to be joined at the office this week by computer science student Owen, who spent time with several members of our team and helped out with tasks including research into accessibility features in Microsoft teams, looking at site optimisation and joining in with share and learn sessions. We asked Owen to write us a bit of a blog post about his week, and he's covered everything brilliantly.
My week at Nexer
I had already come into the office a month before my placement, and briefly met Jen (Senior Business Administrator), Hilary (Managing Director) and Dave (Head of Technology). This was useful for me as it allowed me to look forward to my work experience placement, knowing I had met a few people onsite already.
Monday
I had been told to arrive at 10 am on my first day, and I was looking forward to gaining an insight into how a digital agency operates. Hilary greeted me once I had arrived and introduced me to the team who were in the office. I met lots of people including Simon (Account Director), Dave A (IT Support) and a junior developer – Harry. I chatted to Harry whilst he showcased the translation software project that he had been working on, and I had loads of questions for him which he gladly answered. Dave A and Hilary had kindly set up an O365 account for me and given me a login to a laptop. On Microsoft teams I had numerous messages from other employees, many of whom live all over the country, offering to explain and demonstrate their role at Nexer to me. After replying to these messages, I had my first meeting scheduled with William (Content Designer), Cat (Sales, Marketing and Events Coordinator) and Andrew (Service and Optimisation Manager) regarding SEO. I also learnt about content management systems, more specifically Umbraco.
Uploading this blog post to Umbraco
Tuesday
Since I had freedom around what time I had to arrive at the office, I decided to start just before 9 am for the rest of the week. Once I arrived on Tuesday, I had a call with William in which he explained SiteImprove and his role as a content designer. The benefits of using such software were clear and already I had knowledge of roles I previously had no idea existed. I had also noticed that there was an optional meeting being hosted by Mar on visual thinking and so I decided to participate in that which taught me the benefits of using visual thinking and inspired me to try and improve my own skills. Later that afternoon, Dave B explained to me in depth how the team delivers the client's needs including how each team cooperates with each other and what languages/packages are used in the process. I leant about how sites are deployed as well as the difference between environments.
Wednesday
Dave B set me some useful HTML tasks to complete when I had spare time. I met with Catarina (Research Team Lead ) who described fully how a user research session works and what equipment is used. This would prove to be useful as later on I would be observing one. In addition to this, I caught up with Andrew, who guided me through the new captions feature on windows 11 and did a mini demo. We thought of some questions that we could ask members of the team to test this new feature and he showed me some of the basics of Google Analytics which he would go into in more detail on Thursday. Finally, I was invited to a user research session with Diversity Role Models by Anna (User Researcher), which I joined. Amy (Senior Account Manager) was also in the session, and I found the format professional and the tasks that were set interesting.
Thursday
I had completed all the HTML tasks and so when I had no meetings or calls, I worked on CSS instead. I called Andrew to discuss who we would be testing the captions feature on, and later in the day, I asked Cat, Elizabeth (Senior UX Consultant), Chris (Head of Design ) and Ben (Design Team Lead) some questions about their role at Nexer and where their accent is from, and noted down some findings for later analysis. Dave B gave me an extremely useful explanation of GitHub which I will be using in the not-so-distant future as part of my studies. I learnt how to push/pull to/from GitHub, how to set up a repo and how branches work including how to create and merge them. The advantages are obvious to me since multiple developers can work on the same project without breaking the software, and old versions can be reverted. They use a software called GitKraken to display the branches and give a more visual representation but he told me that it could all be done from the command line or there is free software out there. Lee gave me an overview of the role of a product manager and shared with me an informative video on innovative ideas. This was another role I did not know about and was grateful for the willingness of everyone to explain their role to me and answer any questions I had.
Excel sheet showing the results of our research on how Teams transcription tool responds to different regional accents.
Friday
I spoke with Andrew and he gave me a demonstration of how to use Google Analytics and Google Data Studio, as well as explaining the advantages of using Data Studio. He showcased some work he had done for clients and how it had improved the data that they were collecting, allowing them to learn more about their customers. After this, I evaluated the data I had collected previously on Microsoft team's captions, putting it into a table in excel and ranking the success of translation for each participant. Lastly, I wrote a summary of my time at Nexer and worked with Cat to add as a blog post in Umbraco.
I have found my week at Nexer very insightful, seeing how the workplace operates especially with so many remote employees. I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here, learnt lots, met many great people and would love to return!
A big thank you to Owen for his fantastic work and participation this week. We've really enjoyed having you join our team. :-)