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It’s not just work experience...it’s an experience. Full stop! 

Case Study:

Kents Moats Library
A typical work placement, and a typical trainee...

Kents Moats Library in Birmingham needed an extra pair of hands, to help with inventory, cataloguing and day to day enquiries. We brought in Maria Pivotti, an Italian trainee with a passion for books, who was keen to develop her customer service skills.

Maria quickly took to her new multicultural environment and showed no end of initiative, quickly developing new practices that were adopted in more than one library. She also found time to run a computer course for the over 50s.

“It was a pleasure to have Maria working with us. Her contribution benefited our workplace and challenged our work culture & practices. From the first day, she blended into the team and reached out to all the people and library groups that she came in contact with”
Faydene Gillings Grant, Library Manager

By the end of the placement, Maria had introduced a range of efficiencies and scored the highest marks in every category of her work assessment:

• Adaptation to working environment
• Use of initiative
• Integration into workforce
• Organisation of workload
• Quality and speed of work
• Professional skills, expertise
• Ability to take on responsibility
• Commitment and enthusiasm
• Attendance and punctuality
• Personal skills: self-confidence, reliability...
• Overall assessment of performance

As well as meeting the library’s goals, Maria was able to meet her own objectives: to learn new people skills and further her knowledge of the customer service industry.

The following is an extract from Maria’s Skills Assessment, reproduced with kind permission from Maria Pivotti and Kents Moats Library:

Comments on the trainee’s performance:
Again ETS has provided us with another excellent and superior candidate for our Work Placement Programme in the form of Maria Pivotti. It was a pleasure to have her working with us here in Yardley, Birmingham as part of the Sheldon Library and Kents Moat Library teams. Her contribution both benefited our workplace and challenged our work culture & practices. Maria is a good example of the library employee of the future. From the first day to her last day, Maria blended into the team and reached out to all the new people and library groups that she came in contact with throughout her placement.

All the staff members & regular customers came to know that she was a dedicated individual and that she took all her tasks seriously. She showed initiative in the form of suggesting ideas, as well as taking jobs forward and could be trusted to complete her jobs on her own with minimal supervision. She was extremely flexible. Although coming to work at the Kents Moat Library site, Maria showed willingness to also work at another local library. By grasping the city’s library catalogue/circulation system, she was able to serve the public at any the service points.

Library work carries a lot of routines, and she handled them well, as she understood the importance of replacing and checking the shelves daily. She answered book enquires (face to face & phone), processed the requests/reservations, and guided users to book stock and displays. She supported class visits by assisting with the preparations for the teachers, students and families. She understood the best practice needed for good customer care and showed it in all areas of her work with families. She also quickly became familiar with the ICT Programme for over 50s and assisted with their learning programme three times per week at both libraries (Mondays, Tuesdays & Fridays).

Her main purpose of improving her English, was duly challenged by the local accents, but she did well and referred to library staff when she had difficulty – which was few and far between. Both spoken word and comprehending and speaking in English was very good.

Her interest in Libraries and her knowledge of the book trade in Italy allowed her to ask good questions about library services in the UK. She was able to visit two other sites – Ulverscroft Large Print Books and Birmingham’s Housebound Library Services (Library Services at Home). Both visits gave her a fairly good insight into how these organisations work and support library services generally.

During her time here, Maria participated in the Annual Count of Library Resources (April 1, 2009). She assisted with the counting exercise at both Kents Moat Library and Sheldon Library by taking full responsibility for counting genre of books and ensuring accuracy and that the complete task was done before the end of the day. She also prior to the Count assisted with “weeding” of the stock. Her assistance in these tasks was highly appreciated mainly because of how time consuming and labour intensive these tasks are.

Kent Moats Library was a typical work placement - and of course we’ll be happy to discuss similar successes. You can also read our testimonials from other UK employers.

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We have trainees just like Maria coming to the UK every year, and we look forward to seeing how they could fit in to your company.