Megan Curbishley and Stepping Out of the Cul-de-sac

Public Speaking is an area in which I lack confidence and wish to improve on in the future. In order to fully understand this, I will be following Kolb’s Reflective Cycle. Kolb’s Reflective Cycle has four main points in order to help people reflect on their experiences and how to improve.

 

Concrete Experience:

Public speaking has always been an issue, I become very nervous when having to speak in front of other people in a professional setting. This was especially prevalent when recently presenting a PowerPoint presentation for a group project surrounding a research proposal. When it came to my parts to speak, I became very nervous and rushed through my speech, and my body language became very defensive.

Reflective Observation:

Although I had thoroughly prepared for the presentation, both independently and with my group, I still felt pressured to deliver a perfect performance. The people who we were proposing our research to commented on how fast I had delivered my parts of the presentation and demonstrated their concerns on how they had not been able to fully digest the information due to it being rushed. After the presentation and feedback had concluded, I debriefed with the rest of my group and we each indicated our own faults, and those of others, and everyone else in the group also pointed out my inability to speak confidently and professionally in public.

Abstract Conceptualisation:

From this experience, I can conclude that I may need to practice speaking professionally and publicly in order to build my confidence. I can do this by taking some LinkedIn courses surrounding public speaking and how to convey professionalism through my body language, whether this be in person or virtually.

Active Experimentation:

In the future, when I am faced with public speaking again, I will ensure to take a course prior to the event that will help me to build my confidence. I will convey professionalism through my body language, and the speed and tone of my voice, and utilise the tips that are provided in the course. Also, I will thoroughly prepare, by ensuring that I have conducted extensive and relevant research. This will help me to speak confidently, as I will have the evidence to support my claims.

By using Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, I have been able to identify my personal weakness of Public Speaking, investigate how to improve this and I know my next steps should the occasion arise again.

Hints and Tips: There is a course for everything and anything these days, so if you are lacking confidence in a certain area, be sure to check online to see if there is anything to provide some handy tips.

Megan Curbishley.

Reference List:

Petkus, E., 2000. A Theoretical and Practical Framework for Service-Learning in Marketing: Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle. Journal of Marketing Education, 22(1), pp.64-70.

Over the winter break, I took the opportunity to complete the Digital Marketing Short Course Certificate offered by MediaWorks through York St John University. The short course was split over three weeks, with one module being released each week. In order to assist my learning, I completed the digital workbook that was provided by MediaWorks and made extensive notes on the key topics.

Before completing this course, I was interested in pursuing a career in the digital marketing industry, and had even looked at what internships were available in my local area that I could complete. As I progressed through the modules of this course, I learnt how to utilise Paid, Owned and Earned Media Channels. Each session provided a webinar style video, that showcased the information in an accessible way that was easy to understand.

Even when it came to challenging concepts, such as Tactical Implementation, these were explained in great detail and could be easily understood by anyone, even if they had little knowledge of digital marketing beforehand.

After completing all of modules and session in this Digital Marketing Short Course, it made me realise that I did not want to pursue Digital Marketing in the future. To many, it may seem like I wasted my time by doing this course, however I found it rather beneficial. As I had no prior experience surrounding Digital Marketing, this course indicated to me that this is not a direction in which I wish to take my future career.

Initially, this was quite disorientating, however after reflecting on the course and my key strengths, I came to the realisation that a management role is much more suited to myself.

Hints and Tips: If you get the chance to try something, try it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t want to do it forever, sometimes it can close one door and open ten other doors instead.

Megan Curbishley.

As part of the Professional Practice Module, I have completed the Certificate in Career Thinking that has been crafted by York St John University.

The certificate was divided into six key themes; Career Options, Self-Discovery, Finding Opportunities, Securing the Job, Maximising Your Network and What’s Next?. Each section focused on a central topic of career development, and acted as a guide to allow me to understand my options after university.

Whilst each topic and activity were all very relevant to career development, I found the ‘Maximising Your Network’ sub-theme particularly interesting. I found this especially relevant as it focussed on expanding your own professional network and utilising platforms such as LinkedIn to do so.

The podcast titled ‘Do I really need a LinkedIn Profile?’ (found here: https://anchor.fm/ask-launchpad/episodes/Ask-LaunchPad—Ep–10-Do-I-really-need-a-LinkedIn-profile-e40t82/a-aeu01i ) resonated with me. A member of the York St John University’s Career Team held a session with May King Tsang – a live content producer and founder of MayKing Tea. During this session, they discussed how LinkedIn can be utilised in order to build a professional profile for yourself and make connections to people who already work in your interested industry.

May King Tsang offered some amazing insights into the world of LinkedIn and provided some hints and tips on how to approach professionals within your interested industry. I felt so inspired by May King Tsang that I connected with her via LinkedIn and we discussed how to use LinkedIn effectively and she offered to answer any questions I had about her job as a live content creator.

Connecting with May King Tsang brought traction to my LinkedIn page, and when she posted about our conversation, over 700 people viewed my profile. Below is the post she crafted about our conversation.

 

It was great to discuss how to maximise my network with a professional such as May King Tsang, and without completing the Certificate in Career Thinking, I would not have been able to make such a valuable connection.

Hints and Tips: Don’t be afraid to maximise your LinkedIn network, you never know what opportunities may arise from striking up a conversation with a professional in your chosen sector.

Megan Curbishley. 

Alongside my work placement with the Working Travel Group, I have been completing the Microsoft Office Specialist Associate Certificate. This certificate is shown below:

As detailed on the certificate, in order to achieve the Associate level of the Microsoft Office Specialist Certificate, you must achieve a passing grade in three Microsoft programs. The programs I chose were Excel, Word and PowerPoint.

The first program I completed was the Microsoft Excel Certificate. I chose to do this one first as when I spoke to people who had previously completed the certificates, they said that Excel was the most challenging to complete. Therefore, I wanted to complete the Excel certificate first.

For each program, the GMetrix system can be used. This programme offers access to extensive and detailed study guides that helped to ensure that I knew each Excel, Word and PowerPoint in great detail. I dedicated approximately 10 hours a week to study the Excel work books and complete numerous practice tests. When I began to consistently achieve or exceed to passing grade, I booked a virtual test.

Completing the virtual Excel exam evoked feelings of anxiety, as I wanted to pass so that my dedicated wouldn’t have gone to waste. Fortunately, I passed the Microsoft Excel exam, and this boosted my confidence in completing the virtual exams.

This inspired me to begin preparing for my Microsoft Word exam, I also dedicated approximately 10 hours a week to build my confidence with the program. Similar to Excel, I booked my virtual test when I was consistently exceeding the passing grade of 70%.

Thankfully, I also passed the Microsoft Word exam and repeated the same process for the Microsoft PowerPoint exam. Due to my hard work and dedication to completing these certificates, I achieved my Microsoft Associate Certification.

The obtainment of this certificate has boosted my confidence when I use Microsoft Excel, Word and PowerPoint, and I am aiming to complete the Expert Level for both Excel and Word in the near future.

Hints and Tips: Perseverance really pays off; don’t give up on something straight away, sometimes things just take a little bit of time.

Megan Curbishley.

After the first two weeks of my placement with the Working Travel Group, the task was quite repetitive and therefore there is not much for me to discuss in detail.

Initially the placement was only supposed to be 105 hours, and once each intern had reached this time, we were told that we could either leave the placement or asked if we would continue until our workload was complete.

Throughout the placement with the Working Travel Group, there were numerous instances of poor conflict management surrounding communication between the interns and our supervisors. Communication is one of the key assets in ensuring good workplace management, and both verbal and non-verbal communication are important (Wall and Callister, 1995). Even though we were on a live Google Meet for the majority of the time, there still seemed to be an ineffectiveness in the communication between the supervisors themselves, and then between the supervisors and the interns.

I often felt blindsided when asked to complete a task differently, as it had not been previously discussed and it was disheartening to learn that I was doing certain tasks wrong. However, instead of being told what to do differently, myself and the other interns almost had to guess as to what was expected from us.

At the end of the placement, the supervisors asked whether they could have done anything to support us further. All the interns brought up the issue of communication, and how we felt as though we had been set up for failure when completing certain tasks.

After this discussion, our supervisors reassured us that they would improve their communication surrounding the completion of certain tasks, when they hire more interns. Although this was a difficult conversation to have with senior members of the Working Travel Group, I felt that this was necessary for the development of communication within the company.

Hints and Tips: Try not to be afraid when discussing important issues with senior members of a company, it helps the business develop for the better.

Megan Curbishley.

 

Reference List:

Wall, J. and Callister, R., 1995. Conflict and Its Management. Journal of Management, 21(3), pp.515-558.

After using the weekend to reflect on the use of my time during my placement with the Working Travel Group, I felt refreshed and confident at the beginning of the new week.

The week began with a meeting, where the supervisors expressed that there would be reduced contact from them due to alternative responsibilities. This boosted morale amongst myself and my fellow content researchers, as we felt as though they were confident in our abilities. However, as we approached the middle of the week, a range of technical problems occurred for my fellow interns.

As we weren’t able to directly contact our supervisors, we had to communicate amongst ourselves and persevere in order to solve these technical difficulties. The main problem was that the hotels the other interns were researching were not in their designated sector of the system and we were not equipped with the knowledge of how to alter this. By persevering, I was able to assist the other interns and find the locations of the missing hotel information.

This was especially important, as without finding this information, the pace of our work would have been compromised due to not being able to quickly communicate with our supervisors to resolve the issue.

Assisting the other interns gave me a sense of confidence whilst continuing my placement with the Working Travel Group. When we were back in communication with our supervisors, they expressed their gratitude for our forward-thinking and ability to solve the issue without any assistance from themselves.

This second week of the work placement gave me confidence in my ability to resolve unforeseen issues.

Hints and Tips: Hard work and conscientiousness is rewarded in business settings.

Megan Curbishley.  

As week one drew to a close, I discovered that at my current pace, the work would not be finished by the end of my placement. In order to improve this, I ensured to properly reflect on the use of my time throughout the week. The use of Gibbs Reflective Cycle (Gibbs, 1998) was most appropriate in order to discover where I was failing and how to improve. There are six key parts to Gibbs Reflective Cycle; Description, Feelings, Evaluation, Analysis, Conclusion and Action Plan.

 

 Description:

Whilst content researching for the Working Travel Group, my pace was very slow. I had only gotten through 6 of the hotels in the first week, and if I were to continue at this pace I would not have been able to complete the work.

 

Feelings:

This left me feeling quite disheartened, and caused slight anxiety. I was worried about letting the placement supervisors down, and that I was not getting the most out the placement whilst working at such a slow pace.

 

Evaluation:

On reflection, it was beneficial that I discovered this lack of time management in the first week, as this gave me a while to improve my time management to ensure that all the work could be completed. However, this experience of being behind caused feelings of anxiety, and made me feel insecure when it came to work completion.

 

Analysis:

When reflecting on the first week of this placement, my lack of time management may be justified by the settling in process of beginning a new job. Gilmore and Harding (2021) have described this settling in process as one that is both traumatic and difficult to adjust to. This may give some insight as to why I managed my time poorly, as I was worried about the socialisation via Google Meet, and how I came across on camera. Also, this was the first time that I have worked remotely, and with lots of distractions at home, including a barking dog, adjusting to this was definitely a challenge.

Due to frequent contact with the other interns, we discussed where we were up to at the end of the week. We discovered that most of us were in a similar position, and that collectively we had poorly managed our time. This brought reassurance, as I was not the only intern who felt behind, and we deemed that familiarity with the system over the next few weeks would speed our process up.

 

Conclusion:

I can conclude that there were a variety of variables that influenced my poor time management. Whether these be my dog barking, the anxiety of starting the internship or thinking about how I was coming across in camera, all of these could have influenced my lack of good time management.

After this first week, I ensured that I was limiting the number of distractions that were around me, in order to concentrate on content researching for the Working Travel Group.

 

Action Plan:

In the following weeks, I removed most of the distractions around my workspace, and this significantly increased my work pace. Also, after the initial week, I felt more comfortable with the system and with the people I was virtually working with, and this also contributed to increasing my work flow.

If I were to find myself in this situation again, I would ensure that all distractions were removed from my workspace, and that I felt comfortable with the system I was using to complete any future work.

The use of the Gibbs Reflective Cycle has allowed me to identify the key reasons as to why I had poor time management in the first week of my work placement. Furthermore, this has aided my development within a virtual workplace and taught me how to remove distractions from my workspace, in order to increase productivity.

 

Hints and Tips: Always reflect on how you can improve your productivity. Removing unnecessary distractions from your workspace can help keep you on track with the task at hand.

 

Megan Curbishley.

 

 

Reference List:

Gibbs, G., 1998. Learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning. London: FEU.

Gilmore, S, and Harding, N., 2021. Organizational socialization as kin-work: A psychoanalytic model of settling into a new job. Human Relations, pp.1-23.

In this blog, I will detail a six-week work placement in which I completed 130 hours of work. Below, is the time sheet that was monitored by my work placement mentor, that details when these hours were completed. This time-sheet was based on my login times to the Google Meeting Room.  

The first week of my placement with the Working Travel Group, included a virtual group training session on Monday morning. During this training session, I got to meet the other students who were participating in this internship. After being introduced to the internship by three supervisors, with a detailed PowerPoint, they ensured that we understood the full extent of the placement. Each intern was assigned a sheet detailing the hotels in which we had to research, this totaled approximately 65 hotels per intern. Below, I have inserted a screenshot of what each intern was faced with.

Following the initial induction day, I was expected to log in whenever I was free to do so. On the first day of content researching, I encountered some issues with the system that the Working Travel Group uses, the hotels that I was supposed to write about were not able to be accessed. In order to combat this issue, I utilised the live Google Meet in order to quickly communicate with the intern supervisors. The Google Meet was a highly effective tool throughout the internship, as it gave myself and the other interns direct access to the supervisors, which allowed for any issues to be resolved at a fast pace, allowing us to utilise our time productively.

The ease of use for Google Meet is expressed by Al-Maroof et al (2020), who discovered that the COVID-19 pandemic has shaped the learning and working world, to advance quickly in terms of virtuality. This seemed especially prevalent whilst completing my work experience with the Working Travel Group, who have always been a predominantly virtual company even before the pandemic. Our supervisors expressed to us that they had recently made the switch to using Google Meet, as they reviewed all the predominant virtual working environments and concluded that Google Meet was the best for them to use.

After this initial setback, which was resolved quickly, I commenced with researching about the hotels, by adhering to the strict brief. Each hotel required extensive research, and we were tasked with ensuring that all of the information was factually correct, as well as being written with persuasion, in order to encourage people to travel to that certain hotel. After the completion of each hotel, I sent my work off for approval, and I would receive feedback within 48 hours for each hotel and, if needs be, make any improvements to my work.

After this feedback and any additional edits, that hotel would go live on the website. Within the first week, totalling just over 19 hours, I had only completed 6 hotels. This made me realise that I wasn’t managing my time effectively, and I had to alter my working habits in order to ensure that I was completing the task in good time. How I did this will be explored in the following blog post.

Hints and Tips: Make sure you monitor your timings, especially when completing work for other people. Ensure that you manage your time effectively, and constantly seek ways to improve if you are failing.

Megan Curbishley.

Reference List:

Al-Maroof, R., Salloum, S., Hassanien, A. and Shaalan, K., 2020. Fear from COVID-19 and technology adoption: the impact of Google Meet during Coronavirus pandemic. Interactive Learning Environments, pp.1-16.