October 22, 2020, by Postgraduate Placements Nottingham

New development opportunities for health professionals thanks to remote working

This week’s blog comes from Roberto Berardi who did a Researcher Academy PPN postgraduate placement at Veintrain ltd using his digital marketing and video editing skills.

After the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, getting internship opportunities was influenced by the local and national economic struggles that are happening in the UK.  In May 2020, I was looking for a job in which I could be independent and use my skills within the new restrictions caused by the on-going pandemic. Thanks to the new approach of the Postgraduate Placements Nottingham (PPN) in moving all their placements online, I was able to apply and get a job which required just remote working from my laptop. My placement was with a business called VeinTrain Ltd, an SME offering high-quality healthcare training programmes which contribute to the standardisation of the healthcare sector – in particular with the procedures of Venepuncture and Cannulation.

~ ” contributing to the standardisation of the healthcare sector “

Throughout this placement , I developed, managed and executed video marketing strategies for VeinTrain Ltd’s medical online learning platform with corporate videos, live training and project management. The live training consisted of me co-hosting video-calls in live medical training as an IT communication technician with Zoom software. Video calling nowadays has become the most popular way to communicate with colleagues and business. Learning how to manage live classrooms and chat with course attendees made me understand the potential of this new communication tool during this period of economic and social instability. By co-hosting, I was also able to maximise the attendees’ training experience which resulted in positive feedback throughout ten online medical training sessions.

All these tasks and achievements improved my self-esteem as a professional employee. At the beginning I felt a little overwhelmed but that anxious feeling went away pretty quickly as soon as I started to understand how things worked. By the second or third week of working for Veintrain I was confident enough to start projects of my own and the communications between me, colleagues and the manager became easier and easier.

In particular, the new way to interact, collaborate and communicate with my employer, colleagues and client turned out to be easy, simple and effective.

EASY because it got rid of all the struggles of commuting to the office, preparing lunch boxes and dress code issues.

Secondly, SIMPLE because sharing ideas and projects helped me to see a bigger picture of what we were aiming to achieve and what was the goal of each task that we were executing.

Finally, it was EFFECTIVE because remote working made us more communicative and the constant interactions supported us in being more productive despite never having met before.

Overall, this internship was not just useful for my career and skills, it also shared technical and medical acknowledgements amongst healthcare professionals in the UK. To conclude, the new era of remote working is creating new opportunities for both students and SMEs, from developing pupils’ skills to improving the productivity and outcome of business projects.

If you are a postgraduate researcher interested in doing a postgraduate placement or professional internship please contact our team for more information: ppnenquiries@nottingham.ac.uk or find us on LinkedIn.

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