We are sad to say that Kurt and Karolina’s work experience has come to an end for this year. Kurt will be joining us next year to continue his experience with us and Karolina will be back to focusing on school.
Here are their thoughts on their experience at The Apprentice Store…
Hello! My name is Alex and I have officially finished my work with The Shirlie Project and thanks to them I have now started my apprenticeship at The Apprentice Store. I would like to go over some of the details of my first proper week of employed work, so stick with me as I cover the start of my journey.
This week was most likely the busiest I’ve ever had, especially in terms of travel and variety.
It started at 6:30am on the Monday morning, today we had a visit to one of our clients in Oban. There was no plan set for the day but we definitely wanted to give them a bit more awareness about Office 365. This is to get the staff thinking about some of the problems they currently face and how they can use the technology they’re paying for to solve them. For example, one of the main applications of interest is Microsoft’s To-Do application available on Windows desktops, iOS and Android.
I mentioned the anti-virus we will be offering to customers, Webroot, in the last blog post. This week I had two tasks around this, to get it installed on every computer our client has and to standardise our pricing in an Excel spreadsheet so we can give businesses a quote easily.
Our client didn’t have many computers and we didn’t have any information from their old provider about what anti-virus may already be installed. It seemed like the best approach was to remote onto each computer, check for old software, uninstall it and install the new.
After much research, talking to others in the IT industry and discussion The Apprentice Store has decided on Webroot as the anti-virus we will be offering. This week was exciting for me, I got to see it in action.
The computer I mentioned in last week’s blog post was going to be picked up on Tuesday and I had little on my checklist to complete. I did however need to install the anti-virus and here is where I saw some of the real benefits of Webroot. Webroot allows you to deploy their software with a license key already bound to it.
The Windows course was now over and I was back at work glad to be getting back to the usual routine of things. However I don’t know if I can describe my job at The Apprentice Store routine as there’s a lot of variation in my work, another thing I’m glad about.
The first problem I was presented with this week was in Excel. Our client was trying to link to files in SharePoint but these would open in the web browser rather than in Windows Explorer like they intended. Initially I had no idea how to solve this but was keen to get this solved for them. This one of the cool things about working in this way, the client comes to me with a problem, I either know how to fix it from past experience or have to research it.
The second week of the Windows course is here, not much had changed but since I mainly talked about the course contents in the last blog post I thought I would talk about the areas outside of that a little more.
When it comes to other people on the course, there was about six of us on this one. The earlier Cyber Security course had about the same amount. There was a clear difference between how we interacted though. In the cyber course people generally kept themselves to themselves and there wasn’t much talking between one another. The instructor on this course had us create a group chat through WhatsApp.
Alex Clunas joined us four weeks ago on work experience. Alex’s period of work experience has now come to an end and he left us with this short video of his experiences here at The Apprentice Store. Thanks Alex… Don’t be a stranger!
This week was the start of the “Windows 7 Configuring and Installing and Configuring Windows 10” course. Everything was very similar to before, I was going to the same building, the same hotel and getting there the same way so I found myself looking forward to it and my nerves were kept at bay.
The first day of the course was the introductions, how the teaching was going to be laid out, what we were going to cover everything you would expect. We got given access to two official Microsoft books one on 7 and one on 10 respectively, these were online and weren’t physical copies but that didn’t bother me too much.
There was one more week to go until I went away on another training course, this time around it was all about “Windows 7 Configuring & Installing and Configuring Windows 10” it was again in Glasgow so I was nowhere near as apprehensive as before, I was simply just looking forward to going. I’m sure you’ll hear all about that in next week’s blog post though so I’ll talk about the activities this week.
It was originally last on the list but after thinking about it I moved it straight to the top, a business proposal on cloud managed anti-virus software, due for the end of the month. Why was this promoted? The course! It would take up 2 weeks of my time so I had to get as much as possible done this week.
