My name is Sam, I’m a graduate intern in Aberdeen City Councils employability team. My degree was in psychology, which I graduated with in 2021, after which I spent just over a year travelling and re-connecting with people I had lost contact with during my time at university and the pandemic. After this time I started to look for a job during
the height of Covid -19 which proved to be much more difficult than expected. Job sites were filled with dead ends, false advertisements and bad offers. Of the jobs I did
manage to get an interview for, I was either rejected or completely ignored. I knew I didn’t want to
continue in psychology, but I didn’t know what career I was interested in instead.
After a bit of research I found ABZWorks, I was already living in Aberdeen, so I thought keeping my job search local would be beneficial. Hoping for job market advice and training in interview skills, I called the helpline and signed up to the service. It was only around a month later that my keyworker Paul suggested this internship to me. I applied thinking nothing of it and was surprised I made it through to an interview. During the interview I had to present to a panel of three regarding the job market of Aberdeen. I must have done well as I was later hired.
It took a while for the paper work to come through and be finalised, but once it was, I had my start date. I arrived an hour early, and when I finally did register at reception, I received a call from the team leader, Angela, saying that plans have changed, and instead of coming in, becoming accustomed to the workplace and slowly being introduced to the team, I was taken to a jobs fair. There I did meet everyone and saw the work we were doing and the impact it was having on people.
Since then I’ve been working with the team for a year. Although it was originally supposed to be a 6 month contract from October to end of March, it was extended to March of 2024. In that time I’ve been working on a diverse range of areas from data collection, report writing, event planning and numerous other projects. The internship has provided an innumerable amount of experience and it has been a pleasure to work with my fellow colleagues in the council. Being a client of ABZWorks gave me the confidence and inspiration to act on the opportunities I had, and the skills to succeed in getting them.
PESF Case Study – Neha