Vale of White Horse District Council
Abbey House, Abbey Close,
Abingdon, OX14 3JE
Email: comments@whitehorsedc.gov.uk
Telephone: 01235 520202

Vale of White Horse District Council

My account of work experience at the Council by Kyrsten Cross

I really enjoyed doing work experience at the Council. It was a pleasant and informative experience. I learnt a lot of new things that I wasn’t familiar with before mainly about the Council and how it works but also about being in a work environment.

Kyrsten Cross

I felt I picked up many valuable skills from doing work experience here, not just about the job, but learning how to work with people and dealing with problems and issues that may arise. The best part about my time at the Council was just being able to see how things operate in a workplace. I think this is going to be good experience for when I apply for a job in the future. The worst part was feeling tired at the end of the day. However, I think it would be like this at any placement because it is a lot more active than at school. And anyway, its fun while you’re working.

I was working in the community strategy department with Karen Tolley, the Youth Development Officer. I also got to work with other people in the department and other departments meaning I did quite a variety of work. Everyone I worked with was friendly and welcoming and always tried to make sure I was included in whatever work they were doing. However, I was given some tasks to complete on my own as well meaning I had a large array of jobs to do and not just the same types of jobs all the time. This also gave me more responsibility. I always had a variety of things to do while working here including computer work (publisher, word, spreadsheets, outlook express and databases), attending meetings with my supervisor, filing, photography, attending a youth forum and afterwards writing a report and a newsletter for it.

I also got to work in other departments and buildings such as in the Communications Team where I got to see the kind of work they were doing. I also spent one morning with IT and got to see how they run things and also got to help them with some of their work and I went over to the Guildhall for an afternoon to help out with some work over there.

Overall, I found working at the Council very enjoyable and would recommend it to anyone who is thinking about going there for work experience. There are lots of different types of work you can do such as IT, Youth Development, Transport, Planning, Sports Development and many more. So whatever you’re interested in doing when you leave school, you can probably get some experience for it from here. So, if you are thinking about doing your work experience at the Council then I say go for it because you will definitely have fun and you will definitely learn something that may prove useful for you in the future.