The workers in the office had varied jobs i.e. photocopying, printing, computer work, phoning people, going out visiting people who owed money, like a bailiff, posting letters, writing letters and inputting data into computers.
In each morning the branch manager (Leon) gives out a target for the workers to aim for, for the day, this would include money targets and hopefully an amount of clients each worker had to get in each day. This was usually around 3-5 people.
The citizenship work (preliminary work for the coursework) fit into what the company did because it helped me understand more about the health and safety aspect of the business.
Each worker was part of a union or some were part of more than one, most of the employees were probably part of a white collar union i.e. unions which represent clerical and professional workers, also there will be employment laws protecting the workers if something happens e.g. an accident.
Whilst at Beneficial Finance I found out something’s I didn’t know about the company i.e. what it did and why they did it e.g. they give credit to people when purchasing items which are a fair bit of money and they do this because that some people cannot get loans from regular banks so they go to Beneficial Finance as the rates are cheaper.
My overall opinion of where I worked it was not too bad, it was quite boring at times but it gave me an idea of working life, and made me realise that from that experience I wouldn’t want to get into that type of occupation as it did not look very exciting.
Planning
The practicle citizenship activity was to go on work experience and to see, feel what working life was like for two weeks, most people went to different work places; for instance I went to Beneficial Finance.
This relates to my topic of Health and Safety which I am doing the course-work on. For this my aims are;
- To find more about the company (as I know very little about it)
- Collect useful information i.e. leaflets etc…
I will mainly need to find things on Health and Safety issues but other information I collect would be good also, this helping to learn more about the business etc. Things on Health and Safety that I could find out about may possibly be, how often is the fire drill, where to go incase of a fire etc… and to spot which health and safety signs, rules regulations are in the business block.
To find most of this information out I would be ideal to ask the employees, look around and pick up leaflets which they have.
Here are some good points and bad points about asking the workers and picking up leaflets.
I think that I could Interview people about their work, ask for information, ask people to answer questionnaires, surveys, take photographs of the work place, look through leaflets, magazines, get minutes of meetings, phamphlets and charts. All information which will be collected would mainly be recorded on pieces of paper ready to be sorted out and then written up in neat as my coursework.
