September 22, 2016, by Postgraduate Placements Nottingham
A Thousand Year Old Market Goes Online
This week we interview Jimiama, a postgraduate student, and Hugh Brown, CEO of the historical Melton Mowbray Market, about their experiences of working together through the University of Nottingham’s Postgraduate Placements scheme.
Melton Mowbray Market is the largest town centre livestock market in the country and its existence predates the Domesday Book. The main market has been held on a Tuesday since at least 1324 when it was granted a charter by King Edward II.
Jimiama
How did this placement project come about Hugh?
We were keen to work with a local university, especially in areas where our local skill base was lacking such as IT. In the job market these days, it is always a struggle to get going without experience so we felt that we could offer the right person real world experience in a physical market which is on the cusp of technological change. Jimiama, who the University helped us to recruit, had an impressive CV and his past experience of building an eCommerce site for his own company was really useful.
Jimiama, what appealed to you about the role and how did the experience match up to your expectations?
The placement at Melton Mowbray Market involved creating an auction site and bulletin board for the market so it was a great opportunity to develop additional skills in Ecommerce; which will help my freelancing ecommerce career path.
During the placement I discovered that business requirements can change during the course of a project, which may discourage you and require a change in the entire development. So I learnt about keeping calm, explaining time constraints to the client and try to propose solutions with necessary advantages and disadvantages. Remembering that the client comes first!
Hugh Brown
Hugh, Did the project deliver what you had hoped for?
Yes, we now have an online auction system and a bulletin board for the market, which we will refine further in customer testing.
Jimiama was a thoroughly nice and cheerful person to have around. He’s a good example of a prospective placement student who listened about the business, understood how it works and how it might develop, and then applied his knowledge and skills to the task on a proactive basis – talking to us about what he was doing and documenting his work.
I’d recommend any other businesses thinking of hosting a placement to go for it.
How about for you Jimiama?
I hoped to build my first auction site and it was successful. To be honest I thought it would be very easy work but it turned out to be demanding and more interesting than I thought. I really improved my skills in the time management, meeting deadlines, communication skills domains, and it confirmed my interest in data analysis.
I also appreciated being able to work remotely some of the time as I had more opportunity to work at night when I perform the best!
If you’re a student interested in doing a postgraduate placement visit our webpage for more information, or check out current opportunities at the Placements Portal.
If you are a business interested in offering a postgraduate placement please visit our webpage for more information.
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