Investing in my company’s future growth by working with Collaborative Future interns
Amy Woodgate, Director of Woodgate Consulting shares her experience of working with a variety of interns and hiring a full-time employee through our remote & flexible work placement programme.
Three quarter shot of Amy sitting and holding a small black dog
Woodgate Consulting are a digital consultancy, specialising in learning design and eLearning development. As a small business working in an industry which many young people are simply not aware of, Amy Woodgate has been keen to share her knowledge of the industry and introduce new talent to learning design and eLearning development.
The underlying concepts of learning design are connected to so many disciplines such as user experience, product design, web and graphic development as well as media production.
With an array of industries intertwined within sector, Woodgate Consulting saw the value which our interns brought in, acquired through their interests and experiences. Many young people who are starting out after being out of employment or education might not necessarily have the experience or knowledge of an industry, an aspect which many employers sadly feel is vital to fit a job role. Amy's team however wanted to utilize the passion and energy that comes in the early stages of someone's career.
No one is oven-ready, that growth has to happen at each time, everyone has to have an opportunity to experience that.
So far, Amy's team has worked alongside five very different interns. Ranging from a young person with a background of Photography, who found great interest in the layouts and storylines, to another with an interest in Design Research who found meaningful work in completing background research and testing new tools for the business to use on future projects.
I would quite like to have an army of tried and tested, professional, well pruned, very creative, slightly crazy learning designers who are keen to get the best message across.
While Collaborative Future matched interns with Woodgate Consulting based on interests, skills, character and shared values, Amy also matched each intern's strengths to the projects and tasks that needed to be completed.
From my perspective, someone is essentially handpicked for me..
Our programme gave Amy's team a steady flow of interns, one of which was Kelly, who was hired by Woodgate Consulting as a Junior Learning Designer on a full-time, remote basis thanks to our programme.
Kelly has been an absolute dream, coming from a design and photography background, but also interested in talking through concepts and the narrative of imagery.
The thirst for learning, which Kelly displayed, is a characteristic that is vital within Woodgate Consulting's industry, in which every project differs - from online courses about social care, to ones covering physics and the cosmos.
This variety of fresh talent available through the Collaborative Future programme has also helped Amy to get an idea of the types of people and skillsets she would like when looking at her next hires.
The really good thing about being part of the Collaborative Future network rather than going through a standard Indeed route, or through the people that you know, is that you get the diversity of applicants you wouldn't otherwise.
Based in Edinburgh, but working entirely remotely, the flexibility within our programme fitted perfectly with Woodgate Consulting's approach to working.
Something incredibly valuable for us is that people feel that they can get into their own swing [at any time during the day], enabling them to be the best that they can be - because, ultimately, it makes us the best company and enables us to produce best quality output.
Amy's team also found it beneficial to be able to access our interns flexibly, over a period of months, allowing the team to judge the projects coming in, and their capacity, before having interns come in to support- a path which would simply wouldn't work on a standard recruitment pathway.
Like many digital development businesses in the current climate, Woodgate Consulting luckily found themselves to be inundated with the volume of projects coming in.
We got to the point where there are so many new projects coming through, that we need to grow. It make more sense to start cultivating something more internal, rather than having an external hook in. We've been around now for 4 years and we need to be thinking differently because our sector is changing.
Many businesses see the Collaborative Future programme as a way of investing in the development and future of the company, without it taking up a huge amount of time, which many smaller organisations simply have no access to.
If you are the Director of a company, you end up getting sucked into projects, later on thinking "I'm drowning, I probably should have done some recruitment about 4 years ago and completely forgot.
Woodgate Consulting found our approach to be a more human solution to the ever-changing nature of work - while being quick and transparent, the Collaborative Future programme takes away the hierarchy associated in employer & employee relationships, and encourages collaboration through which all involved are able to discover meaning, value and belonging.
Discover more about Woodgate Consulting and their projects, or find out about Kelly's experience of gaining back confidence & securing a full-time role with Woodgate Consulting through the Collaborative Future programme.