Despite only being employed at 5 Star Courses as a Digital Marketing Apprentice for four weeks, I’ve learned a real range of new things in my time here. Having done the first half of my apprenticeship with another company, I was expecting the work to be much the same when transferring here to complete the qualification. What I’ve realised is that the interpretation of the career role ‘digital marketer’ is diverse, and that the job can have many different facets depending on how open-minded your company and management is. Moving to 5 Star Courses has certainly been the best move I could’ve made when it comes to learning new skills, trying new tasks, and getting involved in a company that gives me face-to-face interaction with co-workers, a novelty after entering the job market in a global pandemic, starting my first job in the winter lockdown, and spending all of spring on furlough.

When it comes to the career move, though, I’ve been asked several times—by friends, family, and interviewers alike—why I chose to go into an apprenticeship, and why now of all times. I’m twenty-two, I have a BA in English Literature & Ancient History, a level 4 diploma in Copywriting, and now I’ve entered a level 3 apprenticeship in Digital Marketing. “Don’t you feel like you’ve progressed backwards?” is something I’ve heard more than once. Progressing backwards? Looking at my pathway on paper, I can see why others might think that, but I’ve never really considered it that way.

Here’s how I see it:

The most apparent difference between each of these levels of education lies in the specificity involved in studying them. Every essay I completed for my bachelor’s degree was painfully specialised—”Identify the most significant mythological origin stories for the region of Sparta in Pausanias’s works”— an aspect of studying I did really enjoy, and it helped develop my research skills, analytical thinking abilities, and general passion for these subjects. My copywriting diploma gave me more general assignments and lessons—how to write effective headings, the style of writing press advertisements, common industry codes of practise—but allowed me to spearhead my interest in writing into a clearer skillset to access the kind of sector I was interested in. Now my apprenticeship has me answering phones, compiling documents, solving problems, communicating within the company and outside of it—and most importantly, writing copy. I’m not only being guided in enhancing the skills I already have, but I’m picking up other workplace essentials I’ve never had to do in education before. It’s easily provided me with the broadest amount of experience and understanding of hands-on tasks of any level of education I’ve been in—more so than my A-Levels, at the same level of education, or my internship conducted in summer last year—and will likely be the most helpful experience to me when I eventually graduate into a job in this area. Plus, I’ll get an academic qualification while I’m at it. I personally see this as the progression I couldn’t have envisioned for myself four years ago, but needed to come to eventually; the progress that is now easing me into the working world step by step.

That being said, I wouldn’t have made it to this place had it not been for the education that came before it. I wouldn’t have a lot of the skills that earned me the apprenticeship in the first place without the diploma, and I wouldn’t have known this was the path I wanted to come down without the degree—going through University helped me understand my passion and how it can apply to the working world, and taking on the diploma after that helped me shape my skills into something I could tangibly use as a head start. An apprenticeship is an incredibly viable path for leaving education at any age, be it 16, 18, or 21, in order to gain skills and experience in the adult world. But it is also a path adults and professionals seasoned in their role go down in order to gain the qualification or experience necessary to change or solidify their life path. This is not a backward progression for me or anyone else—it is access, it is insight, it is bettering my own understanding and developing my personal aims. The long and short of it is, more education can only be a progression forward, not backwards, and everything builds me up into what I’m achieving now, and what I want to achieve in the future.

-Katie