Levi Lawson - Unlocking My Potential With My Career Ready Experience

Levi shares his Career Ready Experience with DYW Moray

About Me

Hello, I’m Levi, the DYW Career Ready Student and I’m going to be telling you about my experience during my internship. I’m a person that is constantly active either with fencing or challenging my mind with D&D or Magic the Gathering, coming up with the new strategies to team up with my D&D group. I’m also a person that is both driven and creative when it comes to most thing I enjoy. With a love of game design and coding which will link into what I have done during my internship because I want to pursue a job related to coding or game design either in the arts or the audio or possibly in programming.

What is Career Ready and why did I join?

I had joined Career Ready because I wanted to gain the opportunity to learn what it’s like to be in a more professional workplace. It has helped me build up more confidence and developed even more key employability skills. The employability skills I developed will help me when giving example’s when answering employer’s questions during interviews. Career Ready is a programme that helps students develop the skills and the confidence and the experience that is needed to succeed in the world of work. It helps young people by matching them up with an employer to be a mentor for the 4-week internship and there are also masterclasses given by Career Ready.

What did I do during my internship?

I made a guide on things about game designers such as the meta skill, game designers’ roles, requirements, universities and colleges and Moray local game studios. I created this on Canva that lets you make designs easily either for social media, important documents or newsletters. Canva is a creative tool used by many with lots of purposes. Another thing I did was a social media post to encourage people to join in on National Coding Week. I created a better and polished CV that is for a generic use that I can customise for most things. I also learned what and how to use the STAR method to answer question for an employer in an interview. I used RUBI which is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) which stores contact information on multiple employers. I used RUBI to remove contact information. It does get easier to use and is simple and a key resource when holding large amounts of contact data. I also used Excel spreadsheets which had data on how often employers engage with students. With that data I had made a presentation on the top 30 employers this far into the year who have engaged with students. I was given an Excel document that had data on the employers who have signed up to the DWY Pledge and cross check with the employers attending the KGS (Keith Grammer School) career fair and sent it back to the school coordinator so she can talk to them about the Pledge. I also met with Kelsey for a tour at Chivas, to learn about whisky production and the programming jobs that can be found within the distillery. The major one that was mentioned is a job as a technician. This role would be to make sure that the whiskey production is working as expected with data. The data can be collected by computers or by hand, then comparing it with past data. Although it is mostly collected by computers now even with more traditional whiskey distilleries.

Skills gained and developed?

My communication and networking skills have developed by getting feedback from people - phone calls with employers like Louisa from Hunted Cow, or meeting with Stacey from Made Moray, and Lucy from BAE Systems and Kelsey from Strathisla. I have improved my team working skills by gathering feedback or helping people out with doing odd jobs or working on Excel documents for them. I had kept using my creativity skills by using Canva to design the game design booklet, so it was condensed down to be posted to social media and the employer engagement presentation on the top 30. I have improved my problem solving and analysis skills by making phone scripts to make sure that I would get all the information I needed from them. I also had to figure out the best way to answer interview with the STAR method.

Advice for future career students?

During my internship, I had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience in several areas related to career development, employer engagement, and creative design. The experience helped me understand how different roles and skills come together in a professional environment. I would mostly say is to be prepared to have quite a few teams meeting and meetings with employers.

Reflect on the internship and how it helped shape my career goals?

I believe that all my skills have developed a lot over the time of my Career Ready internship and feel much more comfortable and confident now. Looking back, my internship has helped me gain a much clearer understanding of what I want to do in the future and even maybe expanding on what I want to focus on in the future and do something in programming instead of just game design.