As a Tropic ambassador I sell products to individuals and groups and this helps me to improve on my selling and promotion of products as well as learning about ingredients, client care and communication skills and also managing my own finances.

I helped out at Calthorpe Academy for a few hours once a week as part of a programme Solihull School had. Calthorpe is a school for children with disabilities and so this really helped me to improve on my patience and communication skills. It was a very eye opening experience and it really taught me a lot helping me to improve my understanding of the fact that everyone is different and needs to therefore be treated as an individual. Helping out here was one of the most challenging things I have done as I saw some children struggle and sometimes get frustrated over things that everyone else does without even a conscious thought. Learning to be able to cope with these situations and the tantrums that sometimes sparked off I once again learned the value of team work by working with the teachers as a team. Some of the students were very spontaneous and I often had to respond using my initiative in order to calm the situation.

Working at Now Recruitment was very different to the other work experience I had done as this was in an office environment in a recruitment/payroll business.Here I learned to fill in official paperwork and to work with the other employees to help meet targets. I also had direct contact with customers and this helped me to improve my communication and learn to deliver a very high standard of customer service. The work also included a lot of work on computerised systems teaching me the benefits of being organised, on time and professional at all times.

Cannonball 2000 was a specialist car rally involving a road trip across Europe for approximately 40 vehicles owned by high net worth individuals. Here I helped in the office to create a database of all the details about each vehicle and the rally participants (customers). This required me to be well organised and learn to speak to the customers in a professional manner again helping me to improve on my customer service and communication skills.

As the name suggests this was a kennels/cattery. Working here helped me to improve my problem solving, time keeping and organisation as we had many animals that needed feeding, walking and cleaning as well as any other care needs that they had. This meant that we had to use team work to be able to keep organised and to achieve timely results. For example if someone was running behind I learnt to be able to work in more efficient ways so that I could help them to catch up too, so if my job at the time was to clean out a set number of kennels and they had to ensure all the water bowls were clean and full I could help by cleaning some of the bowls as I cleaned the kennels.