A day with Ahead Partnership & Wellington Place

Inspiring women of the future

We joined Ahead Partnership on the 18th June to sit down and spend a morning getting to know some female students from around Leeds. Ahead Partnership helps to provide partnerships between educators, communities, and employers. They help to inspire students on how to kick start their careers. Netpremacy were more than happy to support such a fantastic organisation.

The aim of the event was to inspire young women to look further into the future, to consider what they want to do when they finish school, and raise their aspirations.

We had 3 volunteers from the Netpremacy team: Project Manager Ashley Parker, Head of Support Kara Gresty and Senior Marketing Executive Bryonie Brignall. Each with a very different role at Netpremacy, the team were able to give students a comprehensive insight into working in different areas of technology. 

The morning was kicked off with some simple ice breakers, designed to help the volunteers and students to get to know each other. 

There were also stations where students were encouraged to answer statements such as “What makes job satisfaction” by writing down their answers and a “wall of positivity” filled with words of motivation from the volunteers.

The large group was then split up into 2, the first group was taken to have a tour around Wellington Place. The students were taken around a number of businesses, the Netpremacy office being one of the pit stops along the way. The group was impressed by our hammock and space ship meeting room, and even had a go at table football. This helped to change the students perception of what a “typical office environment” should look like. 

Who am I?

Next on the agenda – “who am I”. The teams were given a diagram where they were encouraged to write good points, bad points, and areas they would like to improve on. Volunteers worked with the girls to focus and help students see what skills they do have, instead of focusing on what they couldn’t do, but also a chance to gain advice from the volunteers on how they can work on those development areas.

Lightbulb moments 

Volunteers stood up and spoke about how they reached that “lightbulb moment” and realised what career path they made the decision to go down and how. This brought to light that not everyone knows what they want to do straight away, and many had to go down different paths before they came to a career they are in now. 

Bryonie found her “lightbulb moment” when working in a pub at university, she realised that marketing was the path she wanted to go down after helping out with the companies social media and design work. This realisation has led to Bryonie to delivering strategic marketing campaigns for Netpremacy, alongside one of the world’s leading tech companies, Google.

 

Having done her degree, work experience and finding a job in HR, Ashley made a career change and decided that she wanted to work more closely with clients, moving into an Account Manager role. However, this was where Ashley actually had her “lightbulb moment”. She found that she was able to understand technical solutions that were being put forward by the development teams, communicate them in an understandable way for customers, and then worked with the customers and development teams to bring these to fruition. This inspired Ashley to move into the world of projects as a Business Analyst, and find an innovative company where she could build on these skills. That was when she found Netpremacy, a company that partnered with customers to help them implement the latest Google technology, where Ashley is now responsible for delivering those projects as a Project Manager.

Kara’s “lightbulb moment” came to her in a previous role when she stepped in as emergency cover for her boss. This made her realise she loved being able to support her team to ensure they got the most out of the day. She then decided to start training towards team leading instead of just technical. This then lead on to Kara running the entire support team at Netpremacy. 

Hopes and dreams 

Next, we paired up and sat down in small groups to discuss the students goals for the future and how they might overcome any obstacles. We discussed what they would like to achieve and made drawings from it so the students could take this as a reminder and something to look back on. This was a great exercise to tap into what the girls saw their futures looking like! 

Our morning with Ahead Partnership was a fantastic opportunity to connect with girls who may be unsure of what direction they want to go in when they leave school and really encourage them to believe in themselves. Sitting down with the students allowed us to speak about Netpremacy office culture, and how it differs from a typical “office” stereotype. The session also let us speak about how employee well-being is important and plays a big role in our culture at Netpremacy. A big thank you to MEPC who organised and funded the whole event, we look forward to many more in the future! You can read more about the day, and view more pictures here.

Discover Netpremacy’s career opportunities here. We’re always looking for talented, ambitious, and passionate people to join our fast-paced, friendly team.

Watch the video summary of the day here.

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