November Apprentice of the Month - Emma Payton
We are happy to announce that the winner of the LDN Apprentice of the Month is Emma @ Cambridge University Press!
Nominated by LDN Publishing Skills Coach, Vimbai Shire - Emma is a member of our LDN Class Reps and has been a huge part of making LDN Apprenticeships an even better experience for all our apprentices!
We received some awesome feedback from Emma’s line manager and Commissioning at Cambridge University Press, Laurence Koster, which you can read below!
Emma’s Skills Coach:
Emma has done so much over the course of this month to not only complete and submit an excellent final project, but she has also given her time and the knowledge, skills and behaviours she has gained on the course and at work to help the Content Team with proofreading some of the online content, and the Sales Team in promoting the apprenticeship via a recent appearance on Book Machine’s ‘Weekly Wisdom’.
She regularly promotes the apprenticeship and the benefits she has gained from it on her LinkedIn channel and is extremely conscientious about keeping her apprenticeship work up to date. At work, her eagle eye has been noticed and commented on by her employers and they have been impressed by her keen observations of anomalies on projects in progress which others in the team missed.
Emma’s Line Manager
Energy:
Emma doesn’t hesitate to get stuck in and embrace the opportunity to learn about a completely new product, process or area of publishing. Emma reaches out to the team to offer her help and to try to find opportunities to reduced others’ workloads.
Emma carves out niche areas of specialism where she can contribute her ideas. Emma has also seized on opportunities to be an ambassador for apprenticeships, to be a class representative, to stand for election to be a staff consultative forum representative and to put herself forwards for initiatives like Hot Shoes and the Better Learning competition.
Enthusiasm:
Emma always approaches new tasks with great enthusiasm; whether the task is large or small, easy or daunting. Emma soon became a valued member of Super Minds 2nd edition team and quickly showed a flair for creativity, especially on briefing for the animated song videos, and giving some really great, insightful and incredibly detailed feedback on all-important Level 0 cover illustrations.
She is even one of the most active members of our team on LinkedIn, re-sharing Cambridge University Press posts and sharing her own. Emma jumped on the chance to take part in a BookMachine webinar and a CCSkills film about apprenticeships, enthusing her enthusiasm in both cases, and often tells colleagues and managers about her apprenticeship experience.
Willingness To Learn:
Emma works in publishing for Primary English Language Teaching, a specialist area, alongside editors who have taught English and built up ELT knowledge over years. But Emma is not at all put off by this, and is determined to learn about ELT and the long list of concepts and terminology that go with it.
Not only this, but Emma has successfully got to grips with quite a few systems and processes that were alien to her at the start of the apprenticeship. She has also sought to learn essential business skills like prioritisation, now using these to good effect. Emma employs an array of strategies to learn; seeking help from colleagues, using books, using online courses and video tutorials, and attending in-house training sessions.
Ability To Take Feedback:
There is a lot of feedback to take on board at this level, both from the employer and from the apprenticeship provider. Emma is great at receiving feedback and is always keen to work differently or better on the next similar task in response to feedback.
Emma actively asks for feedback in case where she needs it but hasn’t received it. Just one area in which Emma received feedback is editorial consistency, and she now understands how important this is and embeds it in her work; the eye for detail is actually something that Emma is already good at, so learning to use her eye for detail in a way that contributes to editorial consistency was a logical progression.
An important part of Emma’s work now and moving forwards is and will be giving feedback to others, including suppliers, such as animators, and authors. Her experience of receiving feedback will be of great benefit for knowing best practice in giving feedback.
Propensity To Take Action:
Emma has increasingly gained a good understanding of how her work on some components of Super Minds 2nd edition fits into the much bigger and very complex picture of the whole product.
This is no mean feat, and has involved getting to know how Microsoft Project schedules work and understanding how many different people work together at different stages of the projects. Armed with this understanding, Emma is now better able to anticipate what else needs to happen and take action.
In addition, Emma has often quite independently taken the initiative to make herself known as a go-to person for discussions around making our materials accessible to learners with specific learning difficulties (working with the Language and Pedagogy Research team), and volunteered herself as a mentor to an upskill apprentice, for example.
Earlier this year, when Emma quite unexpectedly found herself working from home like the rest of us, the urgent needs of the business unit quite rapidly changed and we needed to react to customers’ needs during the pandemic.
Emma was asked to carry out and present research on how our competitors were responding to the crisis in terms of what they were offering to customers. It was a huge ask of Emma to embark on this competitor analysis because it wasn’t something she’d done before, nor did she have much prior knowledge of the competitors or the segments.
Nonetheless, and despite a very vague brief, Emma pulled together a detailed analysis and recorded a presentation for the team meeting. She then took feedback on board, responding to questions asked, and expanding to cover new areas, by producing a part 2 to her presentation. It is absolutely crucial that we are informed about our competitors’ responses at this time, so this was an important piece of work.
Our runner up for this month is Robert Dunne at FanFinders, who was nominated by Digital Marketing Skills Coach, Howard! With feedback provided by Robert’s line manager, Jasmine Gurney.
Robert’s Skills Coach:
He has worked hard on his project revisions, portfolio summary and learner journal recently, demonstrating a positive approach to receiving feedback and acting upon it.
Robert’s line manager:
Rob started working with us back in September 2019 and has fast become a valued employee. His willingness to take on any task that is thrown at him was certainly a welcome surprise. With the launch of the content and news site, Rob graciously and keenly took on a whole load of new tasks that resulted from this launch, and his ever-growing to-do list is tackled with efficiency and an unprecedented level of energy, I need to know where he gets it, so I can have some too! His level of commitment to the role, the team and the company is shown through his high level of accuracy and quality of work.
Rob is consistently producing work or assisting on projects that are integral to the success of the business. He is pretty much single-handedly managing a team of 30 bloggers and experts to ensure our blog site churns out high quality content on a daily basis. During the early days of the pandemic, he even found time to produce all-important updates for our readers on how the pandemic affects them.