This week we had another guest speaker, Roger Hayes, who is a senior counsellor for APCO, a global communications and business strategy firm that specialises in emerging markets, and this was the basis of the talk to us. During his career, Dr Hayes has lived in New York, South Africa, India, to name but a few places, mostly because that is where his work has taken him.
Dr Hayes shared with us what he values in a junior executive that he may hire and also told us that working on a global account or for a global company isn't as scary as we may think. Roger stated that in interns and potential employees he values higher education and encouraged us to take our degrees further to masters and PHDs in the future because he admits there are some skills you just can learn on the job. Now this something I have considered but have always felt that especially now it is too expensive to d a masters straight after university as I believe there is no or little funding provided to you as it is postgraduate study unlike under-grad. For me finding a job that would be willing to put me through a masters or some kind of higher education equivalent is near essential and this is something I would really like to do in my lifetime. As much as I would like to get through university and find a job and start earning some money, I have a feeling that I'm the sort of person education will never leave my life. Aside from being stressed out from it, it also gives me a sense of satisfaction that I have managed to complete something to the end and get something great out of it!
Dr Hayes also shared with us a tip that I think many of us hadn't really considered before- being able to speak another language aside from English. I really envy people who had the opportunity at school to pick a language to learn. My secondary school only ever gave the option of French as compulsory for every year 7-9 student. Fortunately I was in the top set that were able to sit a foundation GCSE in year 9 and so I do have a French GCSE (C grade). However, I'm not keen on French and although I know enough to get me by if I ever went there, it' never my first choice of holiday or destination so I never get to use it. On the other hand I would love to speak Spanish! I always go to Spain or Spanish island for holiday every summer and I know a few basic phrases from being out there regularly. I talked this over with my boyfriend and we've both decided that we would love to learn Spanish if not for anything more than a hobby, though I certainly wouldn't mind working out there.
But then, I got thinking... if that is what I really want to do I need to consider a lot more than just learning a language right? When I chose my modules next year taking the Global Marketing module may be in my interest and this could open up doors for possible dissertation topics, couldn't it? I would also need to do some background research to see if there is even a public relations and marketing market in Spain and what is it like, will it differ greatly from the UK?
So I did some background research... I joined a couple of LinkedIn groups to keep updated about the market there and I also looked up some Spanish PR and Marketing agencies and reviewed the case studies of their work and their types of clients. It was comforting that the majority of these websites' content were in English but still to live out there speaking Spanish is essential.
Everything I looked at was encouraging and really feel like I have even more options open to me now than I thought I had before.
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