Working under pressure – During my time at Stafforce I was sent to work at a range of bars on their busiest nights. I adapted well to these different situations, working quickly and efficiently while remaining calm and confident with customers. I have also had to work to tight deadlines to organise events for Marrow. I planned what we needed to do, delegated appropriately and thus ensured that the events were successful.
Communication – As Film Unit Booking Officer, my responsibilities were to order the films from the distributors via telephone (as chosen by the selections committee), and subsequently keep in contact with them by phone, email and fax as to the progression of the order (making any changes and substitutions as necessary), and to relay this information to the other committee members. This involved therefore, telephone communications with the distributors, and person to person communication with the other members of the committee. In addition, as a previous employee in a call centre, I am familiar with the correct way to approach customer service and sell a product to a prospective customer.
Team working – I have worked as an active member of a variety of teams, including a committee member in Film Unit. When we had a scheduling issue, usually due to the the unavailability of a particular film, I needed to get in touch with the selections officer to find a replacement, and if necessary, rearrange the schedule. In addition, my job working in the brewery involved working as part of a team including HGV drivers, forklift drivers and general labourers in addition to junior management in order that the lorries coming in were emptied as quickly as possible to avoid backlog.
Motivation and Initiative – I spotted a gap in the University services, and felt that self-harmers did not receive the help and support they needed. In order to address this, I got in touch with the Welfare Sabbatical, and asked if a support group could be set up. After initially being rebuffed and told that the Welfare service provided the necessary support, I researched the matter further and found that the majority of self-harmers were female, so I emailed the women's officer and she and I set up the self-harm support group ourselves.
Organisation – At Film Unit I was fulfilling two roles simultaneously, working both as the Bookings Officer, and on the Publicity team. During part of this period, I was also the Co-ordinator of Marrow and partaking in monthly (or more often) meetings and workshops with SOMAS, so I needed to be highly organised and ensure I set aside enough time for each task and that each task got my full attention whilst I was concentrating on it. I was also responsible for planning and organising events for Marrow, for which I liaised with the University and city council, arranged venues and publicised the events.
Management and Leadership – At Marrow, I was coordinator to a committee of over 15 people, in addition to a large team of phlebotomists, counsellors, greeters and publicists. I had to coordinate the running of clinics to collect blood samples and sign people up to the Bone Marrow Register, fund-raising events for the Sheffield Marrow group and the national Anthony Nolan Trust and publicising these fund-raisers and clinics, in addition to filling-in for any empty committee positions or absentees.
Financial – At Film Unit, I was in charge of the £20,000 yearly film budget, to be spent over the full year on films. I designed a spreadsheet to work out which method of payment would work out cheaper (flat-fee or percentage of sales with minimum guarantee) depending on projected audience figures, which saved Film Unit almost £1,000 a year. I also collaborated with the Tickets Officer to produce a spreadsheet which would immediately tell the user how much money each film had made, along with year-to-date profit, year-projections and a colour-coded target.
ICT – Whilst at ANT Marketing, I used a bespoke computer programme to fill out customer's applications to join the Homecall service which I was selling. I also have experience with Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, and have also used a variety of open-source equivalents such as openoffice. I am also an enthusiastic contributor to Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, and have some experience of website management and basic html formatting