Douglas Collingwood

I spent a brief amount of time living in Banff, Canada working as a snowboard instructor. I built good relationships with my clients to make their experience more enjoyable and rewarding. This role led to me improving my problem solving ability as I would have to adapt my lessons differently every time to adjust to a diverse range of customers.

During my time at Ashdown Park Hotel, I worked successfully in the conference and banqueting team. This involved working special events like wedding, awards nights and balls. The quality of service for events such as weddings would always have to be exceptional whether I was working behind the bar or serving guests. The main skills I believe I gained from my time here were attention to detail and working in a high-pressure environment.

While working for the business I assisted in many departments and roles. Some of these include: delivery driver, warehouse assistant and sales assistant. These were mainly customer facing roles where I would need to display good communication skills in order to provide a good quality of service to the customers.

The business also has a self storage site which I also helped out in. This definitely improved my confidence as I was mostly alone dealing with the customers so had no alternative but to adjust to any circumstance that arose. The job would entail communicating with new and existing customers regarding storage units as well as keeping track of payments.

Working at the Wiremill was a very good experience as it was my first real job I got straight after finishing my GCSE's. As a team we would efficiently manage a very high volume of customers during our peak hours. I would also carry out complete opening and closing duties to keep the bar working efficiently.