Hexagons at HIVE360

My name is Ceci, I’m 15 and currently in year 10 of High School, and I have a love for composing music and film writing. I enjoy taking classes like drama and music at my school and I’m lucky enough to be accompanied by my friends who also enjoy exploring the world of arts. Coming to the end of the school year brings a few events with it including our Summer Concert and second school show. This year we chose to do two and they were We Will Rock You, where I played the leading female role, and High School Musical.

This week at school is all about experiencing new careers paths, and I was very lucky to be given the chance to work with one of my Mum’s friends Lucy Cheatham, who works in marketing, I didn’t really know what marketing was before my week at HIVE360, but I now know that it is basically about communicating a message to an audience and helping businesses grow. I’m going to be honest and say that I wasn’t really sure what Lucy did as a job, at first, and when told I’d be going to an office I had pictured a very stereotypical office. However, when I entered the building, I was thrown completely. Everything was open and spacious. There was a small cafeteria on the ground floor and large foyer. When we reached the top floor where Hive360 is, the whole floor is open-planned and there were hexagons everywhere!!! They had music playing and everyone was really nice and welcoming. It was far from quiet and dull. The bright yellow office dividers gave a positive feel to the office, and went wonderfully with the potted plants that sat on hexagonal shelving.

I was introduced to Lucy’s team and given a brief tour. Then we drove to a Marketing event at Aston Villa’s stadium, where we saw other businesses promoting themselves and giving out freebies. We sat in a few talks about how to change your website to bring in more clients. They were simple things that would help the client locate what they needed quicker giving them more of a reason to choose your business. We saw some great examples of websites that did this and they had a very minimalist website front. We also went to a talk about using social media for promotion, which was much more my speed. The speaker mentioned how effective it was to be on multiple platforms as the majority of people use social media daily, and it made a lot of sense to target these users. I then spent the rest of the day completing a spreadsheet that gave information about the top 100 businesses that are growing the quickest. It took a while and had quite a few columns to fill out, but it gave me chance to speed up my typing which until today was embarrassingly slow! I was then tasked with writing my own short blog – and here it is!

I don’t have anything to complain about and I have really enjoyed my week here and I’m grateful to have had an office experience. It taught me a lot and encouraged me to work hard at school. It was something about being here that made me love the idea of working, and with such incredible people.

Thank you so much for having me!