The Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust Ltd.

GGAT

About Us

Work Experience

Cadi. Pontarddulais Comprehensive School, Swansea (Yr 10)

After being on a work experience at the Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust Ltd (GGAT) I can quite easily say that I had a fantastic time there. The workers there were all very welcoming to me and made me feel at ease at once. I learnt a lot not just about archaeology in general, but about being in a working environment, communicating with people, how to organise databases efficiently and I got a real taste for what working in somewhere like GGAT would be like.


I was pleasantly surprised by the sheer variety of jobs I was assigned to do and the amount of knowledge I picked up about GGAT itself and archaeology. It most certainly was not a case of simply doing something and getting it done with, I really got to understand why I was doing tasks, how it was helping and sometimes if I was working on a particular task one of the staff would then show me what would be done with my work. It really felt like I was doing something, and that was one of the best things about my work experience.


I picked up a lot of different skills, practical skills, ICT skills, understanding how to read reports on archaeological sites and sort photographs to fit in with the report, organisational skills, and more. I thoroughly enjoyed picking up more of these skills when I worked in the variety of tasks that I did; cleaning finds, sorting and cataloguing archaeological and historical books, finding reference books from the Library to cross reference with the database, updating some of the databases that GGAT have, filing reports away in the report library for the sites, organising ICT reports on archaeological sites to insert photographs where needed, binding aforementioned reports and giving my view on a website page to help teenagers understand about different sections of archaeology for History exams.


The sheer amount of tasks I did in my short stay was delightful, and the difference in them really gave me a flavour for the different sorts of tasks carried out by different sections of GGAT. I really enjoyed myself in the short amount of time I was there, found everyone to be very welcoming, always helpful and it was a delight to have everyone explain so much to me about the work they were doing. The work experience was informative, interesting and really grew on me as I have had no prior experience of quite a lot of what I did.


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