This role included many different areas of the financial services. Whilst in this role I have been involved with credit control, forecasting, dealing with costing for variance entities, collecting information for audits, and third-party agreements. I was responsible for the occupancy costing for 4 of our buildings and the costings for Ireland and our Healthcare team.This role helped develop skills such as:• Confidence. Within my role I had to talk with clients for credit control and to help them with third-party agreement applications. This improved my confidence for communicating with clients in a professional manner.• Innovation. I was given a lot of opportunity within my role to improve how I did certain procedures. For example, I was able to contact more clients for credit control by making calls and regularly keeping track of the progress that I had made with each client.

This was a business that two university friends and I set up which included a drinking games box mostly for students or party planning.Within this role I developed skills in leadership, innovation, strategy, and marketing. I had the opportunity to liaise with potential suppliers and develop innovative solutions to the problems our business had.This role taught me:• Sales skills. One of the most important roles I have is finding new potential customers and trying to sell the product to other businesses. This involved a lot of attempting to build new relationships with potential clients. • Leadership. I would lead our team on the financial decisions that we had to take accounting for our budget and the understanding of the additional costs that we would incur. • Social media marketing. As part of the launch of our company we used social media to attract customers, this included the use of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

I was responsible for the quality of the pool and the safety of all the swimmers in the pool. This included keeping the poolside clean, testing the water quality, making sure all pool rules were followed and de-escalating situations where people had disagreements with the rules. From this role I developed skills such as:• Working in high pressure situations due to the need to constantly be alert. • Strong team working skills as during training we often had to work in teams and know how to work well with each other to be efficient in any situation that could arise. • Responsibility. While at Virgin Active I feel, I was given a lot of responsibility as at each pool there was only one lifeguard and so I was solely responsible for all activity within the pool.

During my time studying for my A-levels I decided to get a part time job at a local pub to gain some real world work experience. This role included me bringing food out to customers, cleaning equipment used by chefs and preparing desserts.Within this role I learnt skills such as:• Handling difficult customers. Occasionally we had customers complain and I would often have to make sure they left happily, dealing with any complaint they had. • Multitasking and time management. The kitchen was a very busy place with lots of jobs needing doing at the same time and so I needed to learn which jobs were most important at that time and prioritise them.

This was my first experience working and so taught me valuable skills. I had to assist the safety testing officers with assessing whether electrical equipment was safe for use. This role allowed me to develop such skills as:• Working to a deadline. We mostly worked after the majority of employees had left and so weren’t given a lot of time to test all of the appliances. Therefore I had to work quickly and to a tight deadline. • Working with professional customers. In most cases we tested in offices as they had a lot of appliances so that there was a lot of interaction with professional customers.