Leo's First Year At Paladin

My first year at Paladin has absolutely flown by. I started here in March of 2025 and it was my first real job, my first office and my first experience of full-time hours. There's something about stepping into all of that at once that makes the whole thing feel like a lot, and honestly it was, but in the best possible way. The apprenticeship came along a bit later, and at the time I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. Looking back now though, it's one of the best things that's happened to me professionally, so I figured it was worth writing about.

We're a small team, seven people in total, which means there's nowhere to hide and everyone knows what everyone else is working on. You feel the impact of your work pretty quickly, and for me that's been a massive part of why this year has been so good. There's something about being in a tight-knit setup like this that makes you care more, work harder and grow faster than you probably would in a bigger environment.

Getting thrown in

Working in a small agency means you're involved in real work from very early on. There's no long onboarding process where you sit and observe for a few weeks before being trusted with anything meaningful. You're in meetings, you're on accounts and you're figuring things out in real time, which was a bit daunting at first but turned out to be the fastest way to learn. The team were brilliant about it too, and nobody ever made me feel like I was asking a stupid question, even when I definitely was. That matters a lot more than people realise when you're new and still finding your footing.

What the apprenticeship actually gave me

The formal side of the apprenticeship, the coursework and the structure, gave me a framework to hang everything I was doing at work on. It made me think more deliberately about why we make certain decisions, not just what those decisions are, and that's something I didn't expect to get as much out of as I did. But the real learning happened at the desk, working on actual campaigns, seeing what works and what doesn't, and getting feedback from people who really know their stuff. You can't replicate that in a classroom, and I think the combination of both is what makes an apprenticeship genuinely worth doing.

The things nobody tells you

Digital marketing moves faster than I expected. What worked six months ago might not work now, and staying on top of that is just part of the job. Over this year I've had to get comfortable with not always knowing the answer straight away and instead learning to figure things out quickly and confidently. I've also learnt that in a small team, communication is everything. There's no passing things up a long chain or waiting for someone else to flag a problem. If something needs saying, you say it, and if something isn't working, you deal with it. That was a big shift from how I imagined a workplace would feel, and honestly it's been really refreshing.

A year in, where I'm at

I came into this not really knowing what to expect, and I'm finishing year one with real skills, genuine experience on real client accounts and a much clearer idea of where I want to go next. The apprenticeship has been a big part of that, but so has just being at Paladin, in this team, doing work that actually matters to real businesses. It's hard to separate the two, and I think that's the point.