Trusting bright young minds: work placement with real responsibilities

At Resource Group, we believe in bright young minds and in giving them real responsibilities to develop their skills for the workplace.
We want to redefine the meaning of work placement into a hugely valuable partnership for both students and the workplace.

The opportunity
In September 2019, the Learning Design team at Resource Group welcomed four International Technical Communication students from the University of Flensburg (Germany) for their 6 -month work placement.
The Fab4, as they quickly became known, worked on the courseware project; an ambitious initiative aiming to apply learning methodologies and latest pedagogy to our technical training courseware and cement Resource Group’s position as a leading EASA Part-147 provider.

The culture “shock”
In their first week, the Fab4 experienced mild culture shock. Despite having a better command of the English language than most British people, the Fab4 had to adjust to speaking English all day at work with the team.
They slowly got accustomed to the necessity to drink tea, engage in small talk about the weather and the correct amount of milk in pre-meeting coffees.

Getting stuck in
After the settling in period, the Fab4 quickly got to work. They understood the objective of the project and their role within it.
Thanks to their technical authoring abilities, they quickly created an invaluable set of process documents to support the development of the project. They received training on graphics packages as well as single source content authoring software. They studied the regulation in detail, ask questions and helped identify improvement opportunities.
They were ready to start getting stuck into some heavy technical training notes! Together with the project lead, the Fab4 introduced clear learning outcomes that are now part of the syllabus and training material. With the support of Subject Matter Experts, they developed technical content with the learners’ progress in mind. They created technical graphics to a consistently high standard and dazzled us with their incredible knowledge of English grammar and technical knowledge.

Part of the team
The Fab4 became an integral part of the team: participating in our Christmas jumper day, cracking jokes, drinking tea at regular intervals and attending crucial meetings and taking professional development seriously at the World of Learning conference.

At weekends, they discovered, with their Resource Group mentor, the sights of the Cotswold, local museums and landmarks. They made the most of their time: explored various UK cities and even took a road trip to Scotland!

What an impact!
As they say, all good things come to an end… after a farewell team lunch washed down with copious amounts cake and tea (what else?), the Fab4 returned home to finish their studies. We hoped that they would go home with a sense of achievement, pride in their work and a fond memory of their time at Resource Group.

We now realise the real winner of this work placement is Resource Group. The commitment, skill, positivity, hard work and dedication of these four bright young minds have undoubtedly left their mark.

They played an instrumental role in the project. They produced training notes that will be used by our students for years to come. No challenge was too big for the Fab4! They worked tirelessly to contribute to our team’s objective to create user-focused, market-leading and innovative training for the aviation industry.

We are so grateful for their contribution, wish them the best of luck for their promising future careers!
Trusting bright young minds is good…we are already excited about doing it all over again in 2020!