Lukas Bartkus 2020/12/18

Jason’s work placement report

Jason was employed for three months at Diftco, near Birmingham, and was supervised
by Ms. Witten. The main objective of the internship was to gain experience in an industrial
environment. The company ‘’Diftco’’ exports construction equipment and is one of the
most profitable companies in the region.

He worked in the Export Office speciality majority of the time, where he was in charge
of preparing shipping documents. Also, he was responsible for checking the containers in
the warehouse. Which played a big role in his experience. He successfully learned how to
use the automatic bar code system used in the warehouses. It was a difficult automatic
system, which assigns a code and a position to every component in the warehouse.
However, it was interesting to discover that even such a sophisticated tool can never
completely eliminate human error. Perhaps the most important lesson was checking the
containers thoroughly, which he failed to do with one of them. He unfortunately sent a
container to Austria instead of Australia, because he misunderstood his correspondent on
the telephone.

The company is successful and really well organized, with a very motivated, hard-
working and dedicated staff. However, he felt like he would’ve been more effective in an
environment with more variety and less routine paperwork. Therefore, he was not satisfied
with what tasks he was given. Interestingly enough, he expected a different training than
the one given.

Overall, the internship was a positive experience for him, which allowed him to gain
significant experience in the given months. However, he seems not to be satisfied with
working alone and therefore didn’t acquire any of the management experience. A
placement at Diftco would be very valuable for first-year students; second-year students
would benefit from a position with greater responsibility.