My Work Placement at CVM World
Hi, I’m Ben and this is a look back at by employment placement at CVM World. As a third-year student at Derby University, studying Business management, I feel like I have gained a lot through academic teaching and learning the theories, but I felt I needed practical work experience to go hand in hand to further my knowledge.
I approached CVM World, a second stage motor vehicle manufacturer who take new panel vans pre-loved vehicles and convert them into customer ready minibuses, welfare vans and campervans to customers specific wants and needs.
Hoping that they had a placement for me, I met with Paul the operating director who kindly offered me work experience once a week within the business, starting off with shadowing the marketing team throughout the different aspects of their role. This blog will describe my first three-week experience within the business.
My First Day Experience at CVM World
When arriving for my first day I felt very nervous and lacked confidence. Then I spoke to Paul again, met the marketing team and the nerves started to settle with everybody being welcoming and friendly making sure I was ok and happy with what we would be doing within the day.
Week 1: Work Placement at CVM World
I started off with a tour of the business, meeting the team, as well as seeing how the operations run across all departments, even seeing the converted minibuses, welfare vans, campervans and how they build them up from scratch.
This is one of the tasks I managed to be a part of. I had the ability to follow a used minibus and follow the process that it goes through to become customer ready.
As well as meeting new people from different departments and creating new connections throughout the business, this helped ease my nerves. Enabling me to be more confident; especially when shadowing on various tasks throughout the day. Including reviewing social media, analytics, photographing vehicles and figuring out which photos are most effective.
Later I started a data cleansing task ensuring information was accurate, up to date and ready for marketing activity. This first week really taught me new practical skills and abilities including how a day within marketing works, which is something my university wouldn’t do as well as completing a placement within a business. For me the first week was already valuable personal development.
Week 2: Employment Placement
The second week of my placement I arrived with a lot more confidence. This made it easier for me to communicate and work with the friendly team at CVM World. I started the day with a follow up on the minibus that I started to take photographs during its conversion build. The minibus had been taken into the body shop to undertake cosmetic repairs which brought the minibus to a “like new” standard.
Then to carry on from the task in my first week I worked with Andy on the marketing team to refine my data cleanse task to obtain relevant contacts like a Procurement, Fleet or Supply Chain Manager rather than just a general contact within the company. This explained to me the importance of gathering quality data at the start of a campaign as this has a significant impact on the overall success of a campaign.
How my work placement is going
My third week at CVM World included data analysis and collection. I shadowed the marketing team creating and evaluating a pay per click marketing campaigns for Minibuses, Welfare vans, Campervans and Ford Rangers, we looked at how these are produced, what makes them appealing, how we will reach the target audience and how we review the performance of the ad campaigns. This includes, how much they have cost, how many people have engaged with them and gaining an understanding on return on investment. This was a really good experience to see what the marketing of a business entails and was important for me to learn new skills so that I can apply them in the future.
I have only worked within CVM World for 3 days now and already I feel really welcomed by the friendly team throughout the business, from the tasks that I have completed so far it seems to have made an impact as I have cleansed contacts for the business that can potentially be new buyers and help get additional sales across the range of minibuses, welfare vans, campervans and Ford Rangers, as this would be a great achievement. I currently have 1 week left shadowing and learning about the marketing side of CVM World, then I will be transitioning to the sales team to further my knowledge.
