Hello, we are Lily-Marie and Olivia,

We are two secondary school students in year 10 who have come to CDA Products for our work experience, we have come from a school in Winchester to our grandad’s workplace from Monday 12th July 2021 – Friday 16th July 2021.

This week will be spent by us doing different things that staff in CDA Products do daily, we will be learning what it is like in a workplace and experiencing the same things the staff here do such as how to work different machines, how to package the products correctly etc.

This week with our grandad will be very effective for us to get an understanding of what having a job is like and will help us with deciding if this is the type of job we would like to do in the future.

We both decided to do our work experience in CDA Products as our relatives have previously worked here for our grandad and we thought it would be a better choice to do work experience with somebody we know so that we feel more comfortable in the environment. At first, we were going to choose something typical like a restaurant or a shop, but it just didn’t sound as interesting and we didn’t want to be in an overly repetitive environment like that, our only other option was online work experience due to covid and the circumstances we found ourselves in – this being our struggle to find anywhere that was doing work experience locally.

(introduction)

Originally I was hoping to be spending my work experience around animals possibly in an animal shelter or a farm however due to the covid-19 virus and also being only 15 not many places were offering placements and the ones who did where taking a long time to respond with a definite yes or no, In my last week to find work experience I remembered that my Grandparents run CDA Products together and with the knowledge that some of my cousins had previously worked there before I thought to give it a try, plus it would be better than online work experience anyway. So, my parents reached out to find out if they could take us and luckily, they agreed.

The day before starting my work experience, I had to sign some documents with the rules of the workplace and make sure I knew where everything was located along with any safety precautions etc, This was so that I was aware of what was and was not allowed in the workplace and how to keep myself safe in the workplace

Monday 12th July.

Today is my first day of work experience at CDA Products. I had to wake up at 6am so that I could leave the house for 7am and be ready for an hour-long drive to work. When I arrived, I had to do some staff training which basically just told us the rules of the workplace and what to do in different scenarios, it also told us how to keep ourselves safe in case we ended up not reading the rules properly the day before.

Once I had finished this I was taken into the food preparation room but before I could actually go in I had to find clean overalls that fit me as bacteria can get onto your clothes and this is dangerous in the food room as it can contaminate products. Once I had put on my overalls, I had to put on a hair net to avoid any hair falling onto products and then thoroughly wash my hands with warm water and soap. Then one of the employees showed us how to clean the sink area and took us into the prep room where we helped clean down the sides and over stuff to make sure it was clean before we started working, she then showed us how to check for pests so that we could keep our environment clean and pest free and luckily there was no pests to dispose of.

After we had done this, we were told to start `popping dots`, This was wafer paper with dots in it that we had to separate, these dots will be going to a well know cosmetics shop for their bath bombs. Halfway through this we had our first break for around 10-15 mins and then finished the popping dots task. Once we had done this, we had our lunch and then began our second task which was putting labels on the correct orders / packages. We weren’t allowed our phones until lunch in the workplace because of things like bacteria and we had to wash our hands every time we entered to prep room or touched our face etc to prevent contamination.

We then were taught how to use the presser, this machine is basically just what they use to make the circles in the wafer paper but before you can put the paper through you have to hammer, using a nail, two holes. One in the top corner one in the alternate bottom corner. The holes just keep the paper held into place and then you have to rotate it to print the holes in the gaps the second time through. It is a bit of a fiddley process as the holes sometimes fall out of the paper into the template and you have to pick them out when they do and then when you’re making the holes for it to stay in place using a hammer the paper tends to move which gets annoying as you need it all to be in line so it can work properly. After you press a bit of wafer paper you have to make sure to pile it into the boxes correctly for the dotting process. Once we had done this we began to tidy up by hoovering, wiping surfaces and putting away any tools or resources so that the workplace was nice and tidy for tomorrow.

Tuesday 13th July.

Today we had to do more orders and package them, I then unboxed and laid out some stuff from an order, then me and Olivia started cutting out some wafer butterflies and some circles which we bagged up in 4 different bags then one big bag.

We ended the day by making and popping dots. It was a bit of a slow day and a slow process, but we got through the work faster than expected.

We pretty much just finished the stuff we didn’t finish yesterday in today’s day of work experience and as a hole it was a pretty easy day. We had our coffee break and lunch but decided to finish lunch a few minutes early because there wasn’t anything else to do really other than sit on our phones.

Wednesday 14th July.
Today we were tasked with babysitting in the work cresh for my aunt whilst she worked so we had a very easy day, We had two breaks whilst she napped and then we had to keep her entertained, feed her lunch and walk her but all together it was very easy. There wasn’t really anything hard about it as she was in a good mood all day and was easy to please so it made our job a lot easier.

Thursday 15th July.
Today we popped and pressed more dots and then we had to package up some butterflies and then we had a late break. Whilst Olivia was doing something with the laser cutter, I was putting ingredient labels on some packages. We left work early today to write a CV for tomorrow where we will have a `mock interview` for a job.

Friday 16th July.
We wrote our example CV and did an interview today not much really but very stressful. I decided that this isn’t the type of job I would want but that it isn’t all bad.