My experience as a Career Ready intern

Blog author: Hamza Pervez, SSE Career Ready Intern

Hello, I’m Hamza Pervez, I go to Shawlands Academy in Glasgow and I’m 17 years old.

This year, I’ve been part of the Career Ready scheme which has involved a four-week work placement at SSE based in the Glasgow Waterloo Street office.

Before starting this job, I was nervous but also excited as it was my first ever opportunity at work experience. I wasn’t sure what to expect but I was looking forward to it!

On the first day of work, it was a chance to get to know the new mentees and the mentors. I was a little shy but after some icebreakers we were given a brief presentation on what SSE is, what its goals are and all the health and safety rules. We then found out about the group projects. For my project, I was grouped with Flynn and Rowan, and we had to make a presentation about Hydrogen and how we can communicate it to people of our age. We had just under three weeks to present it, so we got firing away to work - working almost every day on this presentation. When we presented it, we got feedback and my mentor Nick, who was the sponsor for this project, really liked it and said we had done well.

We went to the SSE headquarters in Perth twice. For the first trip to Perth, there were three different activities that we took part in, and we had to rank the three activities from our least favourite to our most favourite and give honest feedback. We were split into different groups, and we were also split with other mentees from different offices. It was nice meeting with the other mentees from different locations and getting to know them. My favourite activity was the SSE version of snakes and ladders.

The next trip to Perth, we got a tour of the Distribution control room and the call centre. The control room was interesting, but it looked so complicated. Some people had eight screens they were looking at!

Over the course of the four weeks, I feel like my confidence grew. Yes, on the first day I was shy, but my confidence grew more and more to talk to the mentees and mentors I’d never met before. This also helped me improve my skills such as teamworking, speaking and aiming high. For mentors who would want to sign up to this, they definitely should as it’s a brilliant experience. My favourite thing about the whole experience was meeting the new mentees and creating new friends in the process. On the first day we were all shy and didn’t talk much, but on the second day we all clicked. All the mentees were amazing, and I got partnered up with great people.

Thank you to the mentors in SSE for making this so much fun and I hope that we stay in contact, and I hope I made some lifelong friends.