Can you say a little about yourself and your role at HDR UK? 

Until a few weeks ago I was the senior manager for marketing and user insights at HDR UK. I was there for just under two years and in that time (and while on the apprenticeship) I was promoted to this role from the digital marketing manager position.

I led on all of HDR UK’s marketing activity and also on providing an analytics and user insights service to the wider organisation, especially the infrastructure team.

This included analysing data, looking at website activity, creating data visualisations and recommendations to help us improve our engagement levels and better understand our audiences and their activity.

Tell us about the benefits of the apprenticeship

The Cambridge Spark apprenticeship was hugely relevant to my role and my everyday tasks and benefitted me greatly in upskilling me in the data science elements including merging and cleaning data, data pipelines and lifecycles and understanding the value of data.

I constantly worked with data to understand what it was telling me in order to provide improvement recommendations to drive impact – learning the foundations of data and how to combine and analyse different types of data really improved my work in this area.

I was able to use real data and problems from my work and apply them to the new skills and projects within my apprenticeship, so it not only benefitted me and my job but also the wider organisation. This included analysing newsletter audiences, and understanding better which content drives the most engagements and why. In my final modules, I studied and practiced Tableau and also learnt coding basics, and I found both of these topics really interesting and hope to expand these skills going forward.

Has it helped develop your career – and has it contributed to you getting your new role?

The apprenticeship has really helped me to develop my career, my background is in marketing but my passion and interest is in marketing analytics and insights – using the marketing data to improve performance, understand better our audiences and drive engagement and impact.

Learning the fundamentals of data, such as data types, data safety, data cleansing, as well as more advanced data techniques such as visualisation, merging data and data governance has really created a foundation and an advanced skill set to help me progress in my career.

For more about National Apprenticeship Week click here.