For six months, I have worked at South Wales’ Ecology Consultancy, Acer Ecology as a Marketing & Communications Officer. In hind sight, if you had asked me, this wouldn’t have been my ideal dream role, as I admit, I know nothing about ecology. But throughout my time working there, I thoroughly enjoyed my job and the work that it included. I personally learnt a lot more about marketing; developing my own career but also, I learnt a lot more about ecology and nature in general.
Working at Acer Ecology spurred on a passion and an interest in wildlife that I didn’t know I had!
For me, there were times when working at Acer Ecology were quite hard. Not because it was a hard place to work or because the people weren’t nice, it was a great place to work and everyone was really lovely but because unlike everyone else, I didn’t have that knowledge of ecology. But that was also a good thing for me as well because I really enjoyed learning about ecology and researching different aspects of ecology to help create marketing material for the company. Like most people who work in marketing and communications, its good to be challenged! And everyone was really helpful. If I needed any advice or help on anything ecological, everyone was more than happy to help.
In the first few weeks of working at Acer Ecology, I created a blog designated to help graduates who are interested in working in the field of ecology. I created an advice blog called: How To Get Ahead In Ecology and it received really great feedback and response from Graduates and various other companies shared my blog through Social Media. It received such positive feedback that people were asking for more advice so we also created a second blog. It meant a lot to me personally that this one piece of work that I’d written had created such a positive impact on people. This, for me, created a very positive start to my time with Acer Ecology.
During my time at Acer Ecology, the best thing for me was helping with the promotion and organisation of The Ecology Training Courses that Acer Ecology offer. I really enjoyed helping promote the courses through various ways and then also working together with various people to help organise the courses. To help further promote the courses, I had the idea to contact Cardiff University’s Wildlife & Conservation Society and to offer a private course for them.The Cardiff University students were really enthusiastic about attending our Phase 1 Course, 40-50 students showed interest in the end which was brilliant! Cardiff Wildsoc really enjoyed the course and had such positive feedback about Acer Ecology and the way the course was organised. We even arranged to work with them again in the future. It was great to be able to work with Cardiff Wildsoc, for me it was great to initiate that partnership and to be able to generate more interest in Acer Ecology’s training courses.
I personally really enjoyed attending the courses, not only to see our hard work all come together successfully but for me, it was great to learn more about ecology. As someone who comes from a media based background I’d never been to an ecology training course before so I had no idea what it would be like but its really interesting to be outside and to learn and to experience first hand the different types of plants/ birds/ nature that is all around us. I think courses such as the ones that Acer Ecology offer are really great because they offer students the chance to gain some practical experience, experiencing conducting surveys outside first hand.
I really enjoyed The Phase 1 Survey course at Bute Park Education Centre with the Cardiff University students, it was great to see them really enjoying the course and getting involved. It was also really great for Mark Duffell, the tutor of the course, to show us around Bute Park and actually identify the different types of plants you will find. For me, it was all very new and very interesting! The fact that the weather was lovely as well was great and Bute Park is such a beautiful place. I really enjoy walking around Bute Park and the work that Bute Park offers to the community is really inspirational. There’s always something available to do at The Bute Park Education Centre! I do envy those people who get to work with nature everyday and have the opportunity to work outside when the weather’s so lovely.
What I liked about my job at Acer Ecology was that throughout my time there, I gained a lot of experience doing lots of different activities. Sometimes I would be organising the courses and attending the courses, other days I would be assisting in creating tenders as well as my daily duties of updating the clients database and creating marketing material for the company. I really liked attending the different courses and one course I particularly liked that I attended in my own spare time was The Water Vole Survey Course at Magor Marsh. It was great to not only be out of the office but to be learning something new and different. The Water Vole course was really interesting, The Gwent Wildlife Trust gave you the opportunity to conduct your own Water Vole surveys and work together in groups. For me, it was probably like experiencing the day in the life of an ecologist! It was great to actually see the Water Voles around Magor Marsh, too and I’d never been to Magor Marsh before so it was really great to visit there and to be taught at such a lovely place. It was really fascinating to also find out about The Gwent Levels Water Vole Project, a scheme that The Gwent Wildlife Trust are conducting to prevent the further decrease in Water Voles. I didn’t really know anything about how serious the decline in Water Voles was before and it was surprise, both good and bad for me to learn more about this situation.
Overall, I have really enjoyed my time working for Acer Ecology. Unfortunately, my contract was only for 6 months and my time there, sadly ended. But for me its been a really interesting and refreshing experience. Never would I have thought I’d ever work in the ecology industry and really enjoy it. Thanks to Acer Ecology, I have generated an unknown interest in nature & wildlife and I now have a completely different opinion and attitude to ecology. I would strongly recommend people to undertake work in an industry that they’re not too familiar or confident in. When working in the Marketing & PR industry, its very common to do in house PR work where you might not know as much about that certain industry. I think it further opens more doors for you in your career if people can see that you’ve worked for different industries. It shows that you’re not afraid to challenge yourself. I’m now excited to be moving onto a new working chapter in my life that I start in September and looking forward to taking my experience with me into my new job at Welsh charity, Llamau working within an admin, PR & Marketing role. I’m really excited about this role because I think this is more suited to my own individual interests. I have been very lucky and very blessed to be able to have such diverse roles within my career and to have developed a plethora of experience and I look forward to further developing that experience in the future.
The Graduate 