I look after a bank of 50 clients on an ongoing basis. This includes sitting in on phone calls, making clear and concise notes, liaising with the lead adviser on how to best deal with the clients’ circumstances and finally finishing off with a written advice letter confirming our recommendations. I have written advice letters/reports for clients ranging from a singular fund switch to multiple pension transfers. I am in frequent contact with clients to deal with any issues they might have - this is something I very much enjoy. Alongside my day to day work, I completed the DipFP qualification within the first nine months at the company. As with many small businesses, I am responsible for a multitude of different areas. As such, I have been involved in social media for the company. Taking on this responsibility has allowed me to gain more of an insight into how people think e.g. what might attract/detract people from speaking to a financial adviser. These insights have further developed my understanding of how I could approach prospective clients in order to satisfy their expectations. Outside of my professional responsibilities, within my first two months of working for Candid, I set up a work six-a-side football team on Thursday evenings which has had a very positive impact on morale.

The Office for Students is the independent regulator of higher education in England. It is an arms length public body of the Department for Education, whose aim is to ensure that every student has a fulfilling experience of higher education that enriches their lives and careers.Working in a small team, I am mainly responsible for producing a survey for all universities to complete. Needed to create a dynamic Excel template in order to accommodate the bespoke requirements of certain types of universities. Used SAS and SQL to update previous programmes as well as create new ones. Once the new template was created, I used the company's internal software to create an active online area where universities could download and upload the template. The process was not well refined, so I wrote detailed notes for the following year including; general instructions, updates and areas for improvement. Once the survey was made live, I had the sole responsibility of answering any queries that universities had. This ranged from solving issues with downloads/uploads to technical guidance regarding the template. Started to innovate ways of how to supply the data to the university sector. Analysed many different visualisations in an attempt to satisfy the following criteria; The data does not allow for individual universities to be identified, the visualisations are useful for the target audience and can be easily interpreted, the visualisations can be easily updated each year.

The Higher Education Funding Council for Wales is an arms length public sector organisation that is responsible for funding the higher education sector.Whilst in the role, I used SAS to bring in and manipulate data; Excel to export data and Tableau to create maps and graphs. I was given many opportunities to write complex SAS programs from scratch. One task involved importing lots of excel tables into SAS and manipulating them to create one big neat table elsewhere - I explicitly set out the program so that each year someone would only have to change the excel source (an arbitrary task). My communication and networking skills improved over the year as I set up meetings with colleagues to discuss software issues. Teamwork was also key in my role as in order to improve efficiency on the project I was working on I needed to seek input and share ideas. At the end of the placement I began to feel I could critically analyse work I had done with the aim of improving efficiency next time. I was responsible for a small project which involved liaising with other members of the team and presenting in front of senior managers.