Monday

On my first day, I was immediately greeted with a warm welcome from all the staff I had met, all my anxieties I had for the day ahead were immediately gone and I was excited to see what I’d be doing first.

I had a very informative tour of the whole building and the different departments. I really found this helpful because it helped me know where to go around the building and also provided me with a bit of information on each department and what each of their different roles and responsibilities are.

My first task of the day was doing a build status check for 10 of the headphone amplifiers. My job was to check the build of those 10 units against the BOM (bill of materials) to identify missing or incorrect parts. One of the outcomes of this exercise was that I managed to identify any units that didn’t meet Calrec’s quality standards.

This task taught me a lot about the company and how some things work too, for example, each piece of equipment or parts have a stock code attached to them which is what most people use to identify them. Here is a picture of the units that I was tasked to sort through

Later that afternoon, I learned about the structure of Calrec and how it is part of a conglomerate of companies under the parent company of Audiotonix. I was also shown an insightful diagram on both the cycle of a product in Calrec from beginning to end and also the different departments in Calrec such as the RnD, HR, Finance, Customer Support, Marketing and more, this gave me a thorough insight into how the company works and also taught me something new since I did not expect there to be so many different teams aiding the company.

Wednesday

Next, I was in the production department throughout the day, initially, I thought this would have been my worst experience because I had no prior knowledge whatsoever and wasn’t sure what to do, but I think Wednesday may have been one of my best days during work experience, with Thursday being my favourite day throughout the week.

While in production I was tasked with fitting overlays, metalwork and a gasket to blank panels, and assembling the finished panel with faders, PCBs and TFTs, and finally testing the panel. I then went on to populating the Brio chassis, fitting PSUs and various other sub-cards, and finally wiring the console. Here’s a picture of the Brio chassis being assembled which I did.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in production, it was a whole new experience for me and one that I’m grateful for. The staff were also very helpful and taught me how to do everything, with me shadowing the building of the inside of the chassis at one point.

Friday

Then on Friday, I learnt how to upload content to Calrec’s site using their content management system (CMS), which involved uploading the copy I had previously collated and thinking about SEO, keywords, headings, and internal linking. I then spent a lot of time formatting it all and learning how to lay out a blog post on the website.

I also learnt how both PR and advertising work and how different companies target different demographics and markets through advertising their product to their target market and how they meet customer needs.

I then discovered how to format images in Canva to fit onto a website and other forms of social media. This involved editing the picture to make sure it fit in the required scale. Along with this, I learned how to format posts on social.

I took part in a photoshoot in front of the Calrec Apollo console in the demo room and then learned how to create different types of artwork across different platforms.