Joseph Driscoll

From my passion for outdoor sport climbing and my background in Sport and Exercise Sciences, I pursued a job in the outdoors. Go Ape was a perfect start for me, and challenged me to learn a wide variety of skills and necessities to become an instructor. Naturally, this role requires me to be comfortable working at height, and has demanded me to work in very stressful situations - being responsible for my own and our customers' safety.

On a day to day, it is my responsibility to deliver safety briefs, fitting and maintaining the equipment required for a customer, and assisting those at height who are either stuck or who have potentially injured themselves. It is also a requirement to report safety checks, making sure the course as well as the equipment is safe to use before a customer is allowed access.

As an additional responsibility, I was more recently given the task of training and assessing new members of staff. This was a very exciting opportunity and something I felt very comfortable doing. Due to this, I felt it was essential I was up to date with the latest information and method statements set out by Go Ape as a company to ensure I could deliver the correct information, for the safety and well-being of the new staff members.

Issimo was a high end shoe store in the heart of Queenstown. As a store supervisor, I was responsible for running the day to day operational side of the shop. Working here required the utmost professionalism as the clients wanted the best shopping experience possible. Although this job was short term, I learned a lot about the industry and taught me a lot of transferable skills.

At Morrison's I was responsible for the restocking and management of food products on the shop floor. Although this was a temporary role it taught me skills I still use today - such as; time management, working individually and furthering my skills of customer service.

As an employer of Topshop/Topman it was essential to always put the customer first, and give the highest standard of customer service in the industry. My role started as a sales assistant, and I quickly developed further skills to lead the team and run the shop floor, when needed. A back of house position became available that I was eager to fill, so that I could work towards a team leader role. My responsibilities in this job included processing deliveries, exceptional stock management, and neat organisation of sale floor equipment. All of these tasks I had to accomplish working alone, and was fully trusted by the management team to execute my jobs to exceptional standards.

During the eight weeks my role as a researcher gave me experience working with athletes and testing them over a number of trials. This was done as part of a research team and was very important that we worked together effectively. I gained experience using excel spreadsheets and I am confident I can use them for a number of exercises.