April Apprentice of the Month - Eleanor Rose
We are happy to announce that the winner of LDN Apprentice of the Month is Eleanor @ Bloomsbury Publishing!
Eleanor is one of our LDN Publishing Apprentices and was nominated by her Skills Coach – Vimbai and the awesome feedback was provided by Eleanor’s line-manager and Head of Production – Joanne Murphy.
Not only is Eleanor the winner of April’s Apprentice of the Month – she is the very first LDN Publishing Apprentice to pick up the award!
You can read the full nomination below!
Eleanor is a Production Assistant Apprentice at Bloomsbury.
Energy
Eleanor has a huge amount of positive drive and brings a real energy to the backlist team.
Invariably if I give a project to the team of Production Assistants she will be the first to start tackling it, come up with the workflow or spreadsheet for everyone to work from, flag any teething problems, which creates a real drive across the whole team to complete the project in a timely fashion
It is always encouraging that even when the workload is particularly heavy Eleanor always seems to have energy to spare to help out other colleagues and be perpetually curious about all parts of the publishing business and the people who work at Bloomsbury. I don’t think she has had an unproductive day since joining Bloomsbury!
Enthusiasm
Eleanor is delightfully enthusiastic about learning about all aspects of publishing; she shows a real interest in all the people who work at Bloomsbury and the roles that they do which is incredibly heartening to those she interacts with.
In areas of the business she is particularly interested in she is always willing to go the extra mile to help out such as assisting our Events Manager with organising lunchtime author talks and evening Bloomsbury Institute events. But even more wonderful is that when proffered with a frankly somewhat time-consuming and tedious project she still takes it on with great enthusiasm, learning as much as she can from any project.
Both her energy and enthusiasm have made her a really fun member of the team and had a really positive impact on the morale across the team.
Willingness To Learn
I’ve been massively impressed by Eleanor’s willingness to learn both within her Production Assistant role and with the additional time spent finding out about other areas of the business.
Within a week of joining Bloomsbury Eleanor was able to take responsibility for her own lists in our reprint programme having learned all steps of the process of our workflows, our systems and databases, and our network of suppliers. In addition to that she took over compiling our author surveys and tore through a huge amount of our backlist POD submissions in her first weeks.
One of the things I particularly admire about Eleanor is that if she comes across something she isn’t familiar with she is always willing to ask about it which is a great way to learn and is always interested in the context and the impacts of the work that is going on.
Ability To Take Feedback
Eleanor is always open to feedback on her work and progress and any constructive criticism she has received has always been taken on board and implemented straight away; I’ve never know her to make the same mistake twice.
Although I must say that the vast majority of feedback she receives is overwhelmingly positive which she also takes on board but hasn’t made her complacent or less exacting in completing her work.
Propensity To Take Action
As mentioned above Eleanor is often the first to make headway with a team task and set-up the initial workflow or spreadsheet required for the others to follow which clearly shows a propensity to take action.
As also mentioned above she took responsibility for her own lists very quickly which requires her to manage the beginning-to-end process herself and keep everything moving along through her own direction rather than waiting to be given tasks to complete by another team member – so Eleanor really shows a propensity to take action in all her day-to-day activity.
She is also very good at chasing people which is often essential to keep projects on track but can be an incredibly difficult thing for a junior member of staff to do. In addition, when we were short-staffed for a period following the departure of another team member Eleanor immediately stepped up to cover some additional lists in the interim to ensure they kept moving along rather than waiting for the new starter to arrive.
Outstanding Achievements
I’d like to highlight something that on the surface seems quite a small thing but I think illustrates exactly what kind of employee Eleanor is and why she is such a boon to the Bloomsbury team.
Back in January Eleanor met with some members of our HR team and did some other HR-related research as part of her off-the-job training and following on from that she came up with the idea of a motivational email and how that might have a positive impact on a team.
Since then she has been sending a Monday Motivation email to the production team every Monday which will include a mixture of inspiring quotes, relaxation methods, uplifting songs or pictures, fun challenges, requests for info or pics from the team on different topics and so on. So many of the team said to me how much they enjoyed getting it and how it made them smile on a Monday and they appreciated some positive reminders at the beginning of the week.
Then of course last month the coronavirus hit and our team has all been home working apart from each other for 6 weeks and the Monday Motivation email has become even more relevant to us all now and is a really uplifting thing to receive at the beginning of the week both with useful advice, positive thinking, or most importantly a reminder of the fact you are part of this team and we’re all in it together. And frankly, that is priceless right now!