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Interested in roles relating to how businesses are making their practices sustainable? Want a career in sustainability investment, product management, supply chain or consulting? Find out more about the reality of day-to-day roles, highlights and challenges as well as advice on routes in and sourcing relevant experience. Guests include staff from Fairtrade, Abundance Investment, allplants and Orsted.
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
fairtrade, role, sustainability, company, projects, people, business, supply chain, job, degree, renewable energy, investment, bit, organisations, broader, experience, work, offshore wind, speak, sector
SPEAKERS
Jo Budd, Dave Carter, Laura Foody, Jean-Paul Gillett, Anna Barker, Tom Harwood
Jo Budd 00:06
Hello there, everyone and welcome to the UCL Careers podcast. My name is Joe Budd and I'm a Careers Consultant here at UCL Careers. This episode brings you a panel discussion on how businesses are making their practices sustainable in areas such as sustainability investment, product management, supply chain and consulting, as part of our sustainability themed week. Taking part in this panel, you will hear from Anna Barker, a Senior Supply Chain and Programmes Manager at the Fairtrade Foundation, Jean-Paul Gillett, a Senior Revenue Manager at Orsted, Tom Harwood, an Operations and Customer Director at Abundance Investment, and Laura Foody, a Product Manager at allplants. So let's get into it.
Dave Carter 00:56
We have a range of special guests, some are alumni, others are industry guests who represent different areas of sustainability within business. And they're going to be here to engender in you a little bit more information about what they do, why they do, what they do the kind of challenges and the highlights, routes in and hopefully pass on some advice, some well worn advice that they might have for you if you are considering a career within sustainability. Now what I'd love to do is invite Anna Barker, who's with us from Fairtrade. And Anna I wonder if you could just describe a typical working day in your role, perhaps some of the elements, the main elements and what they involve perhaps a particular project challenge you've got your teeth into, and really just to give the students an idea of why you do what you do.
Anna Barker 01:49
Thanks, Dave. Thanks for having me. Um, so yeah, I'm the Senior Supply Chain and Programme Manager at Fairtrade. And in this role, I look after the flowers, wine and gold categories on behalf of the Fairtrade Foundation. My day to day is quite diverse. I work on all sorts of different projects in those supply chains on a daily basis for different sorts of customers. So in terms of the types of thing I can do in my day, I might have a buyer from one of the supermarkets get in touch with me, for example, who buy Fairtrade flowers, or they're thinking about it, and then need to have either an internal meeting or there's a communications moment coming up, and they want to understand how their Fairtrade flower sourcing makes a difference. So I could easily spend the day talking to Fairtrade flower farms, understanding how they spent the Fairtrade premium, putting together quote stories and then helping a supermarket talk about that. Equally, COVID, for example, has been a big challenge for all of the categories I work on. So I might be designing a project with a donor that looks at solutions for how we could support. So we set up a project with the UK Government and also a Tesco, M&S and CoOp for flowers, in light of the fact that that was a supply chain really badly hit by COVID-19. And then I will spend the day kind of designing that project or reporting on it or speaking to stakeholders and understanding what's going on in the ground and the impact that we're having. Likewise, yeah, I could spend half a day with a jeweller, I could just be briefing them on the gold supply chain. What are the challenges? What are the risks? What are the issues that they find? What might be the sustainability solutions that exist for them? And how could they access those, those solutions? And how can Fairtrade help them? So really diverse and really interesting, all sorts of different stakeholders that you're speaking to all within the kind of remit of those sectors? So yeah, a little bit about what I do.
Dave Carter 03:47
Fabulous. Thank you so much for that intro. Jean-Paul.
Jean-Paul Gillett 03:52
Hi. Yeah, so I'm Jean-Paul Gillett. I'm a Senior Revenue Manager for Orsted, a Danish offshore wind company. We're the world's largest developer owner operator of offshore wind, we have the largest offshore wind farm in the world currently installed in the UK. My role within it is as a Senior Revenue Manager is looking at the current revenue streams, kind of optimising them but also looking at kind of a forecast looking forward about what we can do to improve on these revenue streams. And that includes not just looking at the offshore wind itself, but is looking at energy storage hydrogen, how it can all kind of come into combination and deliver a kind of a netzero future right ideally completely go long on renewables, renewable energy. That's quite challenging, as you might expect, because there's a lot of issues around. There's a lot of support in offshore wind around developing a very large portfolio in the future. But there's a lot of issues with the supply and demand and that requires a lot of kind of modelling and market thinking about how we're going to solve some of these issues to be able to integrate as much real world As we want the system I think for me in terms of projects and typical days, I think as I said before, there's no real typical day, but I work across the world. So I wake up quite early and and I speak with with some colleagues in Japan. And then because the day progresses, different markets open up and you kind of go speaking with different colleagues. We're also active in so many markets looking at new offshore wind opportunities. And so looking at how we can optimise these revenue streams to really deliver good profitable offshore wind projects. I think in terms of projects I like is I have a background prior to joining our state in energy storage. So looking at how we can really deploy energy storage to kind of maximise the utility of renewable energy and provide better opportunities for integration of renewable energy, renewable energy futures, quite interesting to me. And so we're developing projects of like with that intention across the world at the moment. And it's quite an interesting but complicated technology. And it intersects across so many fields, because let's say with storage, you're looking at lithium ion, which is in competition with electric vehicles for supply, but it also was driving down the price. So there's a lot of kind of supply chain considerations as lots of costing out looking at how prices are going to evolve over the future. So it's really quite complex, but it's really rewarding when you when you get it right, and you get a project going. That'd be, that's that's my sight, I think.
Dave Carter 06:34
Perfect. Thank you so much, Tom.
Tom Harwood 06:39
Hi, I'm Tom at Abundance Investment, we're an online investment platform for projects which have a kind of environmental or social impact. I'm the Operations Director. So as a business, we work with companies and more recently councils in the UK that looking to raise debt funding for generally for particular infrastructure projects, that can be things like renewable energy, but more recently, as well, things like social housing, or waste management projects, looking at things like energy storage, and other areas kind of green energy, as well. So on the one side, we work with them to arrange and structure, the investments. And the other side, we then list those on our platform, it's open to any ordinary investor in the UK to invest five pounds or upwards in those projects to hopefully, a decent return as well as have a positive impact with their money. My side, we're a relatively small business, about 20 people or so. And I work on the operation side, which kind of covers, I guess, a number of areas in any business, but particularly so I guess, in in a relatively small business. So I generally will handle some areas with kind of customer support. So speaking to investors on our platform, who have queries, whether that's about how to open an ISA, transfer ISAs, or make investments, there's a compliance angle to it. So we're a regulated company. So we have a range of regulations which apply to us, such as how we market investments, making sure risks are clear, for example, to how we kind of handle money, our customer's money, when it comes through to us, then there's a kind of administration part of that both on the platform side, so you know, when customers deposit money with us, processing those payments, that movement of money. And then I guess operations were always covered by a kind of an element of broader business operations. So how we work as a business. And that can be a little bit of HR, a little bit of office management, a little bit of anything, which needs to get done, basically. And so it's quite a broad job that I have. So yeah, some jobs more interesting than others. So today, one of the days jobs as I'm currently reviewing our financial crime policy, and compliance not being my favourite thing, but obviously very important, so kind of reviewing that as a job on my list today. But then a more interesting thing is we're looking at making some changes to our platform and how it operates. So I'm inputting into your new features that we're delivering for the platform, what do we think customers will think about them, testing those features. So that's the kind of from my side anyway, a more interesting side of my job interacting with our tech team. Our platform is kind of built in house so we work with our engineers in house to deliver new features as well. So those are the kind of some of the variety of different jobs involved in my side.
Dave Carter 09:47
Fabulous, thank you so much, Tom. And last, but by no means least, Laura, who's a Product Manager at allplants.
Laura Foody 09:57
Yeah. And so I guess following on from everybody else, I also have a super diverse role. No two days are the same. I know, really cliche thing to say. But it's honestly what I love the most about the job. And so my role is to improve our digital product, not the feed the website, and solving problems, users face, optimising the product, the website to increase conversions. But that whole process of identifying problems finding the most important one to solve, and then testing, designing and implementing different solutions takes a very long time. And so sometimes I'm focused on user or market research, usability testing, and general discovery. And other times, I'm working more closely with product designers and engineers to build and deliver a new feature. And then I also spend a lot like, a lot of time looking at data, whether that's finding opportunity to improve, or monitoring impacts of new releases. And I'd say the biggest challenge in my area of the company is how to match the company mission, which is inspiring people to eat more plants, to the product that we deliver, a lot of our customers come to us, just out of convenience, not because we're a sustainable company, or because they want to have an environmental impact. So thinking of that journey, from the customer's perspective, how do we take someone who's maybe only just or not even really thinking that much about eating less meat, get them to purchase from us support them in that decision and show them it can be easy, delicious. And then how do we keep them with us so they can continue to learn and grow, reduce their meat intake, because that has such an environmental impact, and it's why we do what we do.
Dave Carter 11:55
Great, thank you so much. Alright, so we're going to go round our speakers again. And this time, we're going to focus a little bit on their journey. We might have to talk them a little bit through kind of how they found their way into the sustainability field, perhaps the most important academic and work experiences that they that they undertook to get to where they are. So Anna, I wonder if you could kick us off?
Anna Barker 12:23
Yeah, sure. So yeah, I did my degree at UCL in History. So that was a few years ago now. And fresh out of my degree actually got my first job, before I even got my results. And I went to a really small consultancy, that was really niche. And they specialise in artisanal and small scale mining, which I've actually never heard of before I did it. And turns out that that is actually the way that most of our minerals are sourced and that they are the way that jewellers buy and also technology companies. And that's in all of their supply chains. And there's lots of risks that are very pervasive to the sector. And I went in as an intern for summer, I wanted to work over the summer between graduating and finding a formal job. And an internship evolved into being a junior researcher and then becoming a researcher and then becoming a project manager. And I ended up staying there for a few years. And it was quite random. I mean, I couldn't have guessed I'd go out of history and into mining. But actually, obviously, it set me off in a career in sustainability because that's exactly what the consultancy is specialised in. And I did a Master's part time with that job. In terms of my kind of academic background, I did it at LSE. I don't know if I'd recommend doing masters. Obviously. Now, in hindsight, it's great. But at the time, it was unbelievably hard work. And that came to me with the advice that you know, the sustainability sector values, higher education. I learned a lot out of my masters. But I think I probably learned a lot more in terms of soft skills and balancing a really, really busy workload as much as the knowledge itself. So definitely encourage people who have also been told similar advice that a Master's might help you but I don't think it's it's make or break at all. It's about what you're passionate about and what you're interested in. So yeah, and then I did three years in the consultancy and then moved over to Fairtrade three years ago, and have stayed there ever since. And moved into quite a different role at Fairtrade. So obviously picked up flowers. And then I worked on Ben and Jerry's supply chains as well for quite a long time, and then eventually moved back into gold and also picked up wine so quite diverse. And I think along the way, yeah, what I've learned is it doesn't have you don't have to specialise in specific commodities or sectors or supply chains. It's very transferable. So certainly I have colleagues I know who panic they've got stuck in a rut or have cornered into a specialism early and I don't think that's true. Sustainability is diverse. It's an industry that's learning. There are new topics coming up all the time. I mean, there's never been a high focus on carbon and climate. And then there's, you know, the human right risks and everything that was already kind of discussed quite openly before. And so I think yeah, that's what I've kind of learned along the way is it doesn't really matter what your background is you don't have to have knowledge and expertise in something specific, you just have to have the skills you can transfer across. And I think if you're really, really passionate about it, most organisations are really looking for people who are motivated, willing to work hard and kind of understand a little bit about the sector and why it's important. So yeah, I think there's been my learnings along the way.
Dave Carter 15:30
Fabulous. And you mentioned, towards the top that sustainability, very much values, higher education, and kind of maybe you did a postgraduate course. And this kind of links to some questions we've had in around how important is postgrad courses. Even kind of, you know, moving on to PhDs. How important do you think having that level of higher qualification might be within sustainability, especially at Fairtrade?
Anna Barker 15:58
Yeah, from the Fairtrade side, honestly, not that important. We're very much all about learning on the job, passionate about it. And also, you know, work experience is really valuable. And from the consultancy perspective, it was really important, a lot of emphasis was put on it. But it's partly because in consultant, you're, you're always applying for every job you go for, and therefore is nice to have each person and their consultants day, or what you think might be the next project, and they go from paper at lone off the time. Again, in the world of the World Bank, or the UN, or, you know, if you want to go into the Foreign Office, there is quite a lot of emphasis placed again there on higher education. So it does depend a bit. I mean, obviously, I interact a lot with corporate sustainability managers in different organisations. Within businesses, again, I think they value work experience and interest over higher education. But there is a whole world of sustainability that is also really into that. So I think it leaves it open. If that's the route you want to take, that's great, it will be valued. If it's not the route for you equally, there's a whole other kind of space to work in sustainability where I think that's fine.
Dave Carter 17:11
Yeah, great. And a Master's, and further education will always be there. And often it's useful, I think, to know, perhaps, where you might want to specialise because some of those Master's courses can, can get very specialist. So it's good to perhaps get your teeth into something and find out a little bit more about the world before perhaps even take that step. Jean-Paul.
Jean-Paul Gillett 17:31
Yeah, so I think I'm gonna mirror most of what has been said previously, as well. So I think I started as a civil engineer, why study my bachelor's degree in civil engineering while civil in environmental engineering. And during my whole kind of bachelor's degree, I was always thinking about going into renewable energy. And I was looking, going to careers fairs about when your why energy, renewable, UK trade fairs and all these type of things, looking for a role there. But I ended up in oil and gas. And I ended up in oil and gas working offshore for three years, which was an incredible experience and like travelling the world doing everything, but it didn't scratch the itch, but I had, which was actually I didn't really want to work in oil and gas, I wanted to work in renewable energy. And so I kinda use a master's degree at UCL to pivot away from oil and gas. So I'd obviously learned a lot from that time and gained a lot of experience. But I used that that master's degree and a master's degree in engineering of innovation and entrepreneurship. So it's quite broad as well. But it gave a lot of skills around, well a lot of skills of what I do now around not just engineering, but looking at commercial opportunities, building business cases, new technologies, these types of things. And during actually a career spare similar to this, but in person at UCL, I met a small startup in the energy storage space. And I just got talking to them, and I ended up doing an internship with them at the end of my my master's degree, which ended up with a full time role, which kind of opened the door to where I am now. And I think a year and a half ago, now I joined Orsted and going from, I think progressive these, let's say, I was in that small startup with, I think, five people. And then when I left, it was like 10 people in a small room somewhere in London, really trying to get something going to joining this company, which is now 6000 people and looking at offshore wind projects across the world was incredibly exciting. And I think one of the things I really feel about what made me take that leap and kind of go for that bigger company, because I didn't really want to be in the bigger company after my oil and gas experience was like our vision for the company is to make a world run on green energy. And that really resonated with me that's, that's our screensaver about everything. Every time I bring up my laptop, let's run the world on green energy, and it's something that really drives me in my work and in my passion on what I want to do. So it's really quite good to have that complete alignment between the corporate vision and what you're doing. And I think it was there. Like, there's lots of different types of corporates kind of structures, like for us were matrix organisations. So it's a very flat, but I think there's like, three or four levels between me and the CEO, because the whole corporate structure is quite flat. So we work with lots of different managers, different projects at the same time. So it's incredibly exciting. And I think for me, that whole journey from kind of oil and gas to a company, which actually used to be an oil and gas major, but sold all those assets and has gone from 80% fossil fuel renewables in 2012, to reaching my vision resonates with the company. And so it's it's really quite gratifying.
Dave Carter 21:00
Super. Lovely. Thank you so much. Jean-Paul. Tom.
Tom Harwood 21:07
Yeah, so I did undergraduate degree in Edinburgh, in economics, it's a four year course. So comes up as a Master's, but technically an undergraduate degree. And economics was a good one for me in terms of in touch on a number of kind of areas, you can kind of get quite specific in Edinburgh in terms of courses you can pick. So I was definitely interested on the kind of financial side of things. But also in terms of environmental issues. So climate change, and things like that. So coming out with my degree, I was looking for a role which would kind of marry the two of those things. And although I've done economics, I wasn't necessarily I wasn't being strict finance courses. So I didn't really have a kind of view to be going down that kind of accounting or, or more kind of strict financial kind of role. I've found I was, I think, Well, actually, I was interning at a kind of social enterprise, which does did social investment in London, part of my role there was kind of searching for interesting companies that they could look at. And I think part of my role there, I found Abundance, which was just the kind of early stage pre launch company at that stage, I kind of got in touch, just to say, I was interested in if I could help out in any way. And luckily, I kind of got in touch with just the right time. And they were kind of looking for their first person to actually have to speak to customers and do some of the day to day work that the founders suddenly when they were launching, and I'd have to do. So the timing was, was kind of just lucky for me in that sense. But certainly kind of trying to get out there and look for some of those smaller companies, if that's what you're looking for, it is a different kind of role, you'll tend to play in a is exciting, you'll be doing lots of different things, your roles will change, you get to grow of the company. There are negatives to that as well. You don't have as much structure and perhaps security there. So there's definitely kind of pros and cons. It's not, it depends what you're kind of looking for. But yeah, I kind of started off on look thinking I would be more in the finance side. But as the kind of company grew, if you split up kind of what our business does, our investments team is often much more come from a more finance sector background. So either having accounting degrees or accounting qualifications, things like that for modelling. So while I could have grown into that, I kind of found myself enjoying more of the broader role, less specialised role in terms of qualification needs. So for us as a business, I guess, it kind of depends what area of us you're looking for. But certainly the the key thing where we'll be hiring is, is people is really around the passion for what we're doing, and whatever your background is. So some areas we do are more specialised investments team but otherwise, you know, economics, my economics degree didn't, certainly didn't, wasn't a negative, but generally, we'd like to hire at the ground and kind of grow people with the business. And then because the nature of our kind of small business doing often which lots of innovative new things, you know, building that knowledge up within the business itself. Rather than trying to hire outside it can be often quite hard for a small company because you're looking for quite an odd role. It's not a fixed role that you can go go out and get so we don't necessarily have any fixed kind of qualifications often on the on the nature of your degree, won't matter as much and definitely work experience for us is if you come to us, you just learn how to work to some extent when you when you start your first job, that kind of first year or two, you just you learn a bit of how things work in terms of structuring your own day self motivating things like that, which we find you you're always learning when you first take your first job. So often hiring someone who's maybe had a year or two experience, irrespective of what that is, is a positive that we see. But yeah, it's that motivation, it's kind of coming to us if we know that you kind of buy into what we do. You know that that's, especially for a small company where you might have quite a lot of responsibility or requirements to kind of self motivate and do jobs that you see that need doing. And having someone who really buys into what we're trying to do and our broader mission is a really real positive. Yeah, for how we work
Dave Carter 26:02
And we'll come to Laura in a moment. But just as a reminder, if there are any questions where we're running a little bit of shorter time, but if there any questions for any of our, our guests, if you could just pop them in the chat box, and we'll try and take a couple towards the back end, Laura.
Laura Foody 26:19
Yeah, um, so I graduated with a degree in computer science. But when I left uni, I really didn't have any idea what I wanted to do, I definitely didn't want to be a developer, which kind of puts you in a awkward spot if you've studied computer science. And but I guess I've always had a passion of myself for like, veganism and the role that plays in terms of like global sustainability. And I was really fortunate that someone I had studied with, and was working with allplants. And they had a role open, and it was just on the customer team. I applied, I was fortunate to get it. And but yeah, I was just answering emails, just answering calls. But we were a super small team. At that time, all of us were crammed into a loft, honestly, half the size of the engineering cafe. And it was so tiny. But it did mean I got exposed to lots of roles I didn't even know existed. And product management was the one that really caught my eye, especially having kind of a technical background. And so yeah, I literally just spoke to the head of product asked if I could find out more about what product management is, how you get into it. And long story short, after a few months of like meeting with her, reading materials, I was able to interview for a PMO at allplants and join the team. So I guess, okay, echoing a little bit what Tom said, like, we're a small company, it's just growing all the time, more roles are evolving all the time. And so a lot of the people that we've hired on in the role that they started in, a lot of people come in with little or no experience, and then find themselves doing actually what they were passionate about all all along.
Dave Carter 28:21
Great. Thank you so much. Okay, so just an observation that some of you guys have obviously gone through and done masters, etc. Some haven't. But you all seem to have had work experience of some nature or other. And I would imagine there's probably quite a lot of students with us who are thinking about getting work experience, but obviously have struggled over the course of the last year for very obvious reasons to get work experience, certainly in person. And generally, many of you have also worked for quite small companies. So I was just wondering whether any of you have managed to land work experience or even jobs, not necessarily just through anything that's been publicly advertised. I mean, Jean-Paul, you went to a careers fair and you chatted to someone which seemed to go anywhere, but I just wondered whether either you guys yourselves, or you know, of anyone who have used different creative techniques to kind of make opportunities unlock happen for themselves. I'll just leave that open to, to anyone who might want to jump in.
Anna Barker 29:28
And yeah, I'm happy to add here. I mean, my first job I got out of uni wasn't advertised. I just sent more emails than I dare count out to companies that I thought sounded interesting, and said, You know, I've got the summer. I'd really, really like to use it's called work experience. I'd really like to come work for you. And it worked for the one I got and then when they did recruit, I was already in place. So that set me up really well. And but it wasn't an advertised job. And I'd only ever heard of the company because I think I spoke to everyone I could meet about my interests and what I wanted to do and people will All you should speak to or so I definitely think putting out feelers as far and wide as you want to really helps I honestly get people messaged me all the time on LinkedIn. And I'm really happy to reply and help them and kind of let them know what we're doing. We've had volunteers throughout COVID, so even remote, and they might just do one a day, two days a week with Fairtrade. And again, I think I don't have a statistic, but most of them go on to get jobs because when vacancies pop up, they know the organisation and how we work. And they've got such an advantage. And those weren't advertised roles. So I definitely think being quite propositional really helps it definitely it's worked for me. And it works really well at Fairtrade when people get in touch with us.
Jean-Paul Gillett 30:46
So I think with my experience with small startup, I started, it wasn't advertised, they were just talking about, we had a previous colleague at that company who had studied at UCL, and we were just talking about the company, there is no advertising role there. And I just reached out saying same as NSA, I reached out had a conversation with them, and kind of a bit harder nowadays, but had a coffee and I kind of just, you know, managed to create a role even for myself. And I think also to kind of mirror on his comments, I'm more than happy when people messaged me to try and either for my network or in current company, I am to try and help guide them to where maybe there might be a role, because I understand especially now you can't go for a coffee, that you're probably only going to be relying on reaching out via LinkedIn or things like that. So yeah, I'm always happy to help.
Tom Harwood 31:38
I mean, I my job Abundance. I've been nine years now. And yeah, it was, it was a, I just had a holding website with an email address. And I dropped an email into that. So I can obviously say that, yes, it's an effective strategy. I mean, I say that being frustrated, because on the other end, I'm gonna get a flurry of people emailing me asking, see if we have internship, so we don't at the moment, but certainly, you know, it can't, it really can't hurt to send in inquiries. Do try and don't spam, you know, try and make it clear that you are specifically emailing for that company. And what you know, from our side, if we find interest, interesting people who email us, and we don't have anything available, and we generally don't, because we're only a small team. So not regularly hiring. But you know, we do take note, you know, we do keep that as a lesson. And by all means, if we're then looking for someone for a new job, as I say often that's not going to necessarily have specific qualifications. So if we just have we know a good candidate who's previously emailed and has, you know, a good, broad education maybe and some experience there, and they've shown the passion desire, then then you're on the list, so to speak. So it's definitely no harm in sending in unsolicited inquiries. As much as it can be a bit of bombarding from my side into that question that someone posted just specifically for them on the finance sector, I suppose. But a broader question there on navigating a career transition. It can be difficult as we've kind of all saying internships are low wage or no wage. And that's just not obviously going to work for everyone, particularly if you're London based, but maybe there's a bit more scope for that if we're all remote. You can live at home and live off your parents for that as a zero wage part of the life. So it's it's certainly challenging. Particularly if you've maybe got some you've already got a few years work experience and you're transitioning a bit, you're going to maybe have to look at roles, which are actually almost like a temporary step down as in your career go into a new role, you might not have exactly the experience that they would expect for that. But they'll often, you know, organisations, not just Abundance, but will they are looking for good candidates, that apart from very specialised roles, often, you know, lots of lots of skills are transferable basically. And so while you may have to take a step down, if you're going to a slightly different role or something, I believe once you're in that company, and you're showing your value, so to speak, you're you quickly pick up this the specifics of what that business does, and certainly from our side is not going to rarely going to be it would be impossible for us almost to going out and try and find someone who has exactly the experience because what we do is is quite specific. So we're just looking for people who have good transferable skills, bit of a catch all term that I know but is just generally, if you've got similar experience, even if it's in a different sector, it's definitely going to apply. Yeah, there's, you know, I'm sure it just take a few months or six months before you often will learn the specifics in that sector, but the kind of core skills that you have I'm going to definitely be transferable. So I wouldn't worry almost too much about that if your CV is going to hold up then business is going to be organisations interested in hiring you.
Jo Budd 35:14
Thank you all so much for watching this video. We hope you enjoyed the discussions around the skills and experiences needed to get into the sector. The challenges of working on the frontline, including the impact of COVID-19, and how the panellists have adapted. Thanks again for watching and we'll see you next time.