Transition from School to a Career | by Salvatore Marziano

Leaving school can often be a strange experience for young people. This experience can be even stranger in the midst of a pandemic. I finished school early due to COVID-19 and I was in an immense period of uncertainty in my life. With a lot of my friends having sorted out their universities and next steps, I still didn’t really know what it was that I wanted to do. In the meantime, I worked part-time in a pub which gave me a really good perspective on what it was like to have a role in a team and to be a contributor alongside others. On top of this, I managed to learn some really useful transferable skills such as communication, teamwork and customer service that would later be extremely useful within my apprenticeship and within my new role.

Fast forward about a year of failed applications to a wide number of apprenticeship schemes with different providers, I managed to find my role doing the business administration apprenticeship at Multiverse, within the admissions team. I don’t remember what initially drew me to the role but I do remember feeling confident that I could land it and that some things are just meant to be. Since then, I have really enjoyed being able to help people who were in the same position as I was to kickstart their careers and open their world up to new and exciting opportunities. This, however,  was an entirely new experience for me as I found myself in a completely different environment which was the professional working world. It felt like a seismic shift in life because, having been in education for so long, it kind of got to a point where it was all I had ever known. This meant that at the very start of my apprenticeship, there was so much to learn about the world of work in general instead of just learning the course and the specific job role. Even the small things like learning to write emails to colleagues, getting your opinion across in certain situations and working with other stakeholders were extremely new contexts to me that school can never prepare you for.

I definitely brought a lot of traits from my old sixth form and school days, which is why I struggled massively at the beginning. For example, I had a lack of preparedness, especially for meetings which massively held me back as I wasn’t getting the most out of my interactions. In order to overcome this, I had to get into the habit of bringing a notebook and taking down the important takeaways from meetings. I started planning my week on Sunday to get ahead and write to-do lists which really helped to put me in a much better place going forward for the week ahead and overall this just made me feel ready to do more. This was just one of the many learning curbs for me when first starting out and it took making a lot of mistakes along the way to really transition myself into the employee that I am today. 

So my advice to those starting new careers (whether that is via an apprenticeship or not) is to acknowledge that you will make many mistakes along this long road and that is okay. In fact, it is more than okay. It is not just to be expected but embraced. This kind of learning on the job can only be achieved by getting things wrong. As I said, education itself cannot prepare you for the real world, so go out there, and try things. Fail at some, succeed at others. Whether this is throughout the duration of your course or just a new role in general, the more you fail, the easier your transition to this new life will be. 

Salvatore Marziano is a Multiverse alumnus and is writing for the Apprentice Lens. Here's more about him:

"I enjoy discourse and conversation. My aim is to present the reality of university alternatives and share the experience of my journey whilst including the highs and the lows to its full transparency."