Hello!
And welcome to the Apprentice Blog Vol.2! It’s already been a whole week since I officially joined the Artz Team as our second ever Artz Apprentice. This may not come as a shock to many of you as it’s all I’ve been banging on about for the best part of the last 6 months but for anyone who hasn’t been around and is wondering ‘who is this person?’. Let me rewind a bit…
My name is Charlotte, and I joined the Artz Family back in 2017 when my Dad (Artz Printer extraordinaire) introduced me to the centre as a place to go for my work experience. I absolutely fell head over heels for the place, I remember telling my mum ‘if money wasn’t a thing, I would work there for the rest of my life’ and now that’s finally happening! Well maybe not the rest of my life but for the next 18 months at least.
In the following years I helped out wherever I could; volunteering at shows, holiday camps and eventually getting my hands on some design projects for the multitude of shows we put on throughout the year. By the end of 2019 I was getting the kind of experience that people my age just were not getting, in my field at least. Which is where the idea of this whole Apprenticeship was born.
Then in early 2020 I floated the idea of an Apprenticeship out to Mark and he was all for it, he’d actually already been thinking about it but it wasn’t something he could guarantee me, so I started looking into it and when the time came we could see what happens.
But then the pandemic hit, and my hopes for an apprenticeship had been completely derailed (or so I thought).
The way the team responded to the pandemic, was just incredible. With my new found free time, having just finished my final year in college, I decided to go all in, doing whatever I could to help the centre. Over the course of the next 3 months I jumped on every project I could, this time made me realise that what I cared about wasn’t getting any old apprenticeship, I needed tailored experience and no one else was going to be as invested in my professional and personal development as the centre was.
However with the pandemic leaving us high and dry I had to get creative with a way to get the experience I wanted without any funding and so I began my internship. I would be able to get my experience that I needed but still have enough money to live off, working 4 days at the centre and the other 3 at my part time job in Marks and Spencer. It was a lot of work but I knew the experience I would get would be invaluable, and a hell of a lot cheaper than going to University!
Little did I know that this internship would actually open up the opportunity to utilise a relatively untapped income stream for the centre allowing me to start this Apprenticeship just 6 months later. So now I get to learn all of the things I wanted to learn whilst also getting paid for it!
I am so excited for what the next 18 months will bring. I’ve already learnt so much in my time at the Artz Centre, I can’t even imagine how much more I will get to learn now that I work here full time. Which is kind of why I decided to get on the whole blog bandwagon. I wanted to document my experience here and share what I was learning.
Now writing is not my strong suit, but that’s why I have decided to use it as my platform. So bare with me as my spelling and grammar may not be fabulous but as with everything else in this job its going to help me learn and grow.
So there you are my first Apprentice blog! I hope you enjoyed it and didn’t nod off too much between paragraphs! I will catch up with you on the next one.
Charlotte xx