Learning the ropes: My work experience at Prospect Research

Written by Isabella Gardner

My name is Isabella, and today I’ve taken the day off from my GCSE year at school to see and experience the world of work. The Godolphin School have been running a programme that gives 14 to 15 year olds a chance to experience what work is like. In my age group, this year is incredibly important for our futures; we’re half way through the most important exams of our lives so far and later this year we’ll all have to be looking at what colleges offer the A-levels we want to take. The problem is, many of us have no idea what we want from life- what job we want, some of us don’t know if we want to go to university or not. So having a day observing what kind of things happen at work, really gives me a chance to think about what sort of thing I want to go into.

The programme my school runs is called ‘Take my daughter to work day’. Obviously, the idea is that one parent takes their daughter (I go to a girl’s school) to their workplace for a day. However, my dad works In Africa at the moment, soon to be working in Denmark, and my mum working in small jobs wherever he goes. So today I’ve gone up to Cambridge to go to work with some relatives who own a telemarketing company called ‘Prospect Research’. Today I hope to gain as much experience as I can about what a job involves. I’ll be interviewing a few people and asking them how they got to the job, like what degrees they took for example, and hopefully this will give me an insight on what path I want to take.

I have just been able to sit in on a meeting between two of the main people in the company. They were talking about targets over the next six months, and how much marketing they should do to achieve their goal. 50% of Prospects Research’s company is working with colleges and universities offering courses and staff training for companies. For example, if a university was doing a course for dentistry, they would ring up different practices seeing if they would want to send staff on the course. In the meeting, they were talking about using the social networking site ‘linked in’ to connect to clients-to send messages and surveys to collect information. They also use bulk email which can tell them who opened the email and clicked on the links so they can prioritize who to ring up and offer their services.

Next I interviewed one of the Account Directors called Jan about her experience in work and how she got to her current job. It was really interesting to see what jobs she had been at, and how she moved from job to job and why. It really taught me that experience counts for a lot in work. Learning by watching others, and learning important skills through experience is just as important as anything else when you want to progress. It was interesting to see how much her experience had helped her, and how she picked up lots of skills by shadowing people and learning from what they did.

Find out more about business development with Prospect Research by visiting www.prospectresearch.co.uk