Tips about starting a marketing apprenticeship with no prior experience

When I handed in my last bit of uni work last June I wouldn’t have expected that five months later I would be starting a new apprenticeship in a completely different field. I graduated from Falmouth University with a 2:1 in Sports Journalism, and even though I had to finish my course at home and still haven’t had graduation yet (thank you Covid), I felt ready to enter the world of journalism.

Like many, I spent hours writing CVs and applying for all and any sport journalism jobs I could find on LinkedIn and Indeed and it wasn’t until months later where I found a local business looking for an apprentice. I applied, and within two weeks I was driving to my new job where I would be a content creator for NextGen Insurance. In the quick turnaround, I didn’t really have time to think about what I was going to do with NextGen, but I was excited to start something new. However, on the drive up it dawned on me that I knew absolutely nothing about marketing.

I’ve been at NextGen for four months now and I’ve really enjoyed it. In this blog, I thought I’d share with you my experiences at starting a marketing apprenticeship with no marketing experience:

You’re here to learn

I think it’s easy to forget that you’re doing this apprenticeship to learn about marketing. Don’t expect yourself to know what you are doing right away. I feel like I fell into this trap a bit when I first started. I felt like I needed to know everything right away and then I was hit with terms like SEO and PPC, and I didn’t have a clue. Not knowing anything at the start is normal and should be expected, the apprenticeship is over a year long, so you have plenty of time.

Everyone on your course is at different levels

For me, being slightly overwhelmed was a common feeling throughout the start of the course. Every two weeks we have a course day, where we get different tutors in and learn about different parts of marketing.

In the first few lessons, I’d be sitting by my computer listening to other people answer questions and think, ‘I’m so behind, I don’t know any of this’. What you need to remember is that in your cohort you’ll get a wide range of people with lots of different experience. I have people who have just left college or dropped out or finished university or people who have been in different jobs for years. Everyone will be at different levels so don’t panic if you feel like you are behind.

There’s a lot of help available

There are so many people within Juice Academy that will and want to help you. You have a set individual who sets you work and hold catch up meetings where you can talk about your work and any ideas you have. You can message the teachers that run the lessons if you want more detailed advice from people with specific needs. This is a good idea when you learn something completely new and you aren’t sure how to use it for your work.

All of these people have their emails open and are more than happy to help you in any way they can and answer any question or give any piece of advice they have. You can also message people within your cohort who have more experience than you.

Doing a Marketing apprenticeship with The Juice Academy has been really fun and I’m really glad I went for it. They’ll be times when you may feel overwhelmed, or the work seems hard but that’s normal. Remember to ask questions, there’s loads of people who are there to help you so make sure you use them. It may seem hard at first but within a few months you’ll be flying.