During the first week of the school holidays in April, the national Tereora College, Year 13 Business Administration & Computing students were placed in various Rarotonga businesses as well as government departments for required assessments on several unit standards for this course. This has been a successful cooperation between organizations and Tereora College in the last two years with CISO having hosted three students.
For this year, senior student Martha Cummings was placed with CISO to learn about the clerical or administrative aspects of all CISO outputs under the supervision/mentor of Statistics Officer, Michelle Aisake. This time around the work placement was planned and conducted with involvement of all staff. Cummings’ schedule involved one-to-one allocated sessions with staff responsible for delivering statistical outputs.
The sessions include an overview of statistical outputs, best practice for carrying out clerical and administrative duties, customer service procedures and the operation of office equipment. The highlight for this placement was Cummings handling of a customer query that was beyond her call of duty. Cummings was able to respond to the query with some help from staff in a timely and efficient manner. As part of her assessment Cummings composed written standard statistical responses to customer queries via email, fax and post.
Cummings says, “Personally I found it a remarkable experience because of the fact that it was my first time out there having a feel of what the work environment is like. It was good to see a peaceful work environment at CISO with everyone cooperating and not just specializing in his or her own area but also helping with other work of the other staff as well. Overall working and learning of the basics with each person was altogether a very interesting experience because while collecting the data you see what is happening to the economy and whether the country is in a good state or not.” We wish Cummings all the best in her future endeavours