My Placement Experience at CleverTouch Marketing

Placement Technology Developer, Brandon Morgan-Miller, shares his experiences of working at CleverTouch Consulting during his placement year...

My name’s Brandon and I’m currently taking a year out from my studies at Southampton Solent University to work at CleverTouch Consulting as part of their Placement scheme.

My course leader at university first told me about CleverTouch, explaining a bit about the placement opportunity, and suggested that I apply. After looking at the description of the role I knew that it would be an exciting area to work in. Whilst Marketing Automation was completely unknown to me, it is something that I could put the skills that I had learnt so far at university into practice.

The main expectation of the role as a Placement Technology Developer is to combine pre-existing knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript with growing knowledge of Marketing Automation platforms to deploy digital marketing campaigns. Although this seems daunting at first, the training you get, along with the open armed nature of every member of the tech team, allows you to take the bull by the horns.

During my time in the role so far, I have worked on three Marketing Automation platforms; Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot. Currently I am a certified expert in Marketo, with the plan to gain a second certification before my placement year comes to an end. CleverTouch promotes the opportunity of becoming certified for a specific platform and offers in-house training to ensure we understand and use the platforms to their full potential. Becoming certified is a great personal achievement as it shows how far my understanding of Marketing Automation and Marketo has come in the short period I have been here. It’s also a great addition on my CV as these skills are highly sought after.

It would be easy for a company to hire placement students and give them meaningless work, but so far during my time at CleverTouch I have been given opportunities to learn something new and work on exciting projects. I have been able to work on some of their biggest clients including PayPal, VMware and Fujitsu. I’ve had the opportunity to become a project technical lead, which entails managing campaign builds from beginning to end, I’ve also had the opportunity to go off site to a client’s office to sit in on a training day.

Another opportunity that I have had during my time here is cooking the monthly (when the weather suits) BBQ – a very prestigious task! Along with the BBQ, CleverTouch also offer other perks including pizza days, cake Tuesdays, wine-down Fridays to name a few.

I am now nearly 9 months into my placement year and the knowledge I have gained so far is invaluable – not just on a technical level, but on a personal one too. Working for a company that doesn’t treat you like a cog, but a valued member of the team is a great experience for any employee, student or not.