Latest / Work It Like A Mum / Life After Kids: How to Upskill and Relaunch Your Career

Transcript

Life After Kids: How to Upskill and Relaunch Your Career · Work It Like A Mum

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm Elizabeth Willits and I'm obsessed with helping as many women as possible achieve their boldest dreams after kids and helping you to navigate this messy and magical season of life.
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: I'm a working mom with over 17 years of recruitment experience and I'm the founder of the Investing in Women job board and community.
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: In this show, I'm honored to be chatting with remarkable women redefining our working world across all areas of business.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: They'll share their secrets on how they've achieved extraordinary success after children, set boundaries and balance, the challenges they faced and how they've overcome them to define their own versions of success.
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: Shy away from the real talk?
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: No way.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: Money struggles, growth, loss, boundaries and balance.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: We cover it all.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: Think of this as coffee with your mates, mixed with an inspiring TED Talk sprinkled with the career advice you wish you'd really had at school.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: So grab a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, make sure you're cosy and get ready to get inspired and chase your boldest dreams, or just survive Mondays.
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: This is the Work it Like A Mum podcast.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: This episode is brought to you by Investing in Women.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: Investing in Women is a job board and recruitment agency helping you find your dream part-time or flexible job with the UK's most family-friendly and forward-thinking employers.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: Their site can help you find a professional and rewarding job that works for you.
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: They're proud to partner with the UK's most family-friendly employers across a range of professional industries, ready to find your perfect job?
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: Search their website at investinginwomencouk to find your next part-time or flexible job opportunity.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: Now back to the show.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: Hello, welcome to today's Facebook LinkedIn Live.
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: I'm delighted because I'm chatting today with Kate Morris, who is a Supermum alumni, and we're going to be talking all about life after kids, how you can upskill and relaunch your career.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: As people are logging on, do let us know if you can hear us all.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: Okay, I've just clicked so we're live now on Instagram.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: So I'm chatting with Kate.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: I'm going to be talking all about why she decided to retrain into doing something completely different, why she chose sales balls and, ultimately, why she chose to train with supermom.
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, kate, for joining us thank you for having me.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: It's exciting to talk about my career and the talk is still your early career than what you did prior to doing what you do now to be honest, I haven't really got a set career.
• 2:48
  Speaker 2: That I was kind of a career path that I'd decided on and I was kind of following.
• 2:53
  Speaker 2: So prior to having children I worked in retail.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: So I worked in retail, I was a um, a deputy manager of a retail store, like a luxury jewelry store in our local shopping center, kind of moved around a bit with them and, as you probably know, with having children life changes and priorities and plans change kind of once you've had children and I just wasn't prepared to.
• 3:14
  Speaker 2: We looked at how much my take-home money would be like after having kids working full-time and it just didn't seem worthwhile to kind of stay doing what I was doing to earn to at the end of the month after nursery bills to come away with, kind of not a lot.
• 3:29
  Speaker 2: So I decided on maternity leave.
• 3:32
  Speaker 2: We'd kind of had that conversation early between me and my partner and I looked at kind of folk trying to find something to do kind of that I could stay at home and kind of look after my little boy and I kind of just fell into child care.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: I say fall into child care.
• 3:46
  Speaker 2: So I did qualify.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: I did an early years educator qualification while I was on maternity leave and I became a child minder so that I could stay at home, I could look after my little boy and kind of just make the most of like that time.
• 4:00
  Speaker 2: Um quickly realized that the way that my husband's working patterns were was that he was off during the week and he did not enjoy having a house for the children while he was on his day off.
• 4:10
  Speaker 2: He worked at the weekends and was off during the week.
• 4:12
  Speaker 2: So we, as it worked for a couple of years but eventually my husband was like I really just need my house back.
• 4:19
  Speaker 2: So I moved into looking at something else and getting sort of more of a like working week, a little bit more consistency.
• 4:26
  Speaker 2: So I moved to our local preschool, was advertising for a temporary manager while their current manager was on maternity leave and I had the qualifications.
• 4:34
  Speaker 2: I'd never managed preschool before but I'd managed in my old job.
• 4:38
  Speaker 2: So prior to having my son I would, as I say, I was an assistant manager in quite a high like with quite a high staff, um.
• 4:45
  Speaker 2: So I was confident that I had the skill set like prior to having my child, having my little boy and I kind of.
• 4:50
  Speaker 2: So I moved into working at a preschool in early years and again it kind of gave me the benefit of being able to do like working hours, that I worked around my son I worked a time like school hours yeah, I did school hours and that kind of really worked.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: My son was about three when I started, so he was at the preschool as well, so it worked really well.
• 5:08
  Speaker 2: I could like I was there as much as he looks back at his nails like, oh cringe, my mum was my preschool manager, but it was fine at the time it was, it kind of suited that you probably didn't really register that anyway, did they?
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: no, to be honest, he had a different key worker and he used to come up to me and he'd be like, mum, can you fill up my water bottle?
• 5:25
  Speaker 2: And I'd be like, yeah, yeah, give me a minute.
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: And then he'd just know that that was a sign of I'm really busy and he'd walk up to one of my other colleagues and be like, caroline, can you fill up my water bottle for me?
• 5:32
  Speaker 2: Because he knew, like he knew, so he was really good lesson so that kind of.
• 5:37
  Speaker 2: Again, that kind of worked for me at the time.
• 5:40
  Speaker 2: But I knew that kind of.
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: I didn't, being in the career that I was in before, kind of being an assistant manager, I had like a defined kind of career path with where I wanted to go when I was in retail.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: I could be a manager, I could be an area manager, I could be a visual merchandiser.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: There was quite a lot of options that you could do kind of within retail than within the job that I was in.
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: But when I kind of looked at the preschool, I was the preschool manager to move into being a teacher or moving into like being a nursery manager.
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: That just kind of wasn't that skill set to kind of develop.
• 6:13
  Speaker 2: I was kind of already at the top level that I could kind of be.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: There was no extra room for me to kind of grow.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: So I was looking kind of.
• 6:22
  Speaker 2: Covid came along and I was looking at options during COVID and my husband re-qualified into Salesforce.
• 6:29
  Speaker 2: He was in retail previously and a couple of our friends worked in the Salesforce ecosystem and had re-qualified and my husband was like, okay, well, this looks exciting.
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: I've seen how our friends have kind of re-qualified and have been successful and so he qualified and got a new job kind of within the Salesforce ecosystem.
• 6:46
  Speaker 2: Right at the beginning of COVID lockdown and I saw how he progressed and like just how it progressed, passionate he was about it and just the options that he had.
• 6:57
  Speaker 2: I feel that one of the things I really liked about the Salesforce kind of ecosystem is that you don't have to go into management to progress.
• 7:04
  Speaker 2: So you can into being a manager if you wanted to, but you don't have to do people management.
• 7:09
  Speaker 2: You can become a product specialist.
• 7:12
  Speaker 2: You can like with all the different clouds there are, you can become a business analyst, you can an architect, you can do development work.
• 7:17
  Speaker 2: There's so many options that you can move into without having to go into people management, like that thought of I kind of been there, done that with people management and it's not that I would say that I won't do it forever, but at the time I was like I want to step away from management.
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: I want to really focus on something that I enjoy doing and an area that makes me kind of passionate about going to work every day.
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: So I was looking at my husband and kind of seeing how successful he was within the ecosystem and he also qualified as a Salesforce Supermum.
• 7:49
  Speaker 2: He's a super dad.
• 7:53
  Speaker 1: I said that you're a super family.
• 7:55
  Speaker 2: I'm a super family, yeah.
• 7:56
  Speaker 2: So I saw him go through the sales for super mums kind of program and course and again I saw the job prospects that he had on the back of qualifying for that and kind of where he went in at entry level and his career took me about two years to commit finally to doing it.
• 8:12
  Speaker 2: But seeing him progress and kind of seeing how successful he's been it kind of reassured me that it was possible.
• 8:18
  Speaker 2: Obviously I had him to kind of see like the benefits of doing it and I could see what kind of what skill sets and I knew kind of I was really lucky that I had him to kind of talk about like what are you doing every day?
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: like what?
• 8:29
  Speaker 2: are kind of entry-level jobs, like what could I be expected to do every day?
• 8:32
  Speaker 2: And the the real like benefit for me is my son's older now.
• 8:37
  Speaker 2: He's 10 now, so he's getting more independent and I was kind of at the point where I was like, okay, so he's getting more and more independent.
• 8:42
  Speaker 2: Now I want to go back to focusing on me and a challenge for me and doing something that I want to do, not because it's convenient for child care.
• 8:50
  Speaker 2: Obviously one of the great things about this is that it is really convenient with child care, but actually, how is it, oh you mean, with the preschool?
• 8:58
  Speaker 2: yeah, so like even, as you say, like even now, so like working from home, like the company.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: I work for a consultancy company and we're fully remote.
• 9:05
  Speaker 2: So we do have offices kind of based around the UK, but predominantly we are a remote company.
• 9:11
  Speaker 2: So, like last week we had a sports day.
• 9:14
  Speaker 2: So my, my boss is really kind of great in that they know I say to them it's got sports day next week, can I just nip out for an hour, and as long as I'm making up that time, whether it's in the evening or starting earlier, as long as I get my work done, it doesn't matter if I need to nip out for sports day or parents evening or all of the other things that we have to do for school.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: It's a never-ending list.
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: Making a Greek costume was yesterday, so going out and just nipping to the shops and getting the bits for that.
• 9:40
  Speaker 2: So it's not.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: They're great in that they know that we're adults.
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: They trust us to know that we're kind of we're still going to do our work and we're still going to make sure that we get our work done.
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: But if we do that, I start three days a week at 7am, I do seven till half past three because that works for me.
• 9:56
  Speaker 2: I take my little boy to after school clubs and things like that, but so I start earlier and I still crack with my work.
• 10:01
  Speaker 2: I still get all my meetings done.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Obviously, if I need to have a little bit of extra and go over on some days, that's fine as well.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: But that flexibility of being able to kind of be a mum as well as having a career is what kind of really drew me into the Salesforce ecosystem and being able to kind of put my like, get back to something that I enjoy doing.
• 10:26
  Speaker 1: So talk us, because people have listened to this and they may not have not got any clue what Salesforce is.
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: And so what is Salesforce and what actually do you do in your job?
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: So what I do day to day.
• 10:38
  Speaker 2: So Salesforce is like an online CRM system, so a customer database system.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: So if you are looking at a way as a company to manage your customer database and manage your kind of your processes and your systems, salesforce is like an online platform for you to be able to do that.
• 10:56
  Speaker 2: So to be able to purchase Salesforce, you have to go to Salesforce and say I'm interested in your product and you buy, like Salesforce off the shelf.
• 11:04
  Speaker 2: So everybody would buy like kind of the standard functionality, depending on what, like price packet, and you can add things on and then where.
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: What would then happen is Salesforce is so customizable.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: Salesforce is so customizable so you might have I have 10 customers that I manage day to day and they all use Salesforce, but they all use it in totally different ways.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: So I have like a range of customers from schools to kitchen companies to end users, like training, like event training days.
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: They're all using Salesforce, but they're all using it in a totally different way.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: So what they look for is consultancy companies.
• 11:37
  Speaker 2: So I work for a consultancy company who can help them tailor their salesforce to meet their needs, so adding in different like, say, for example, if it wasn't related to a school.
• 11:48
  Speaker 2: You might be relating to a child, so you might be having to ask questions about a child who might be wanting to log that type of information.
• 11:54
  Speaker 2: So we build all of that to kind of make it really customizable for a customer and to help them kind of speed up their processes.
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: So moving away from reams of spreadsheets with like rows of data on it to one system where everybody has access to it, you can report on it, you can run reports and dashboards, you can have all of your sales team, your operations team, your invoicing to your accounts team all working from one system, instead of having loads and loads of different spreadsheets kind of spread across different departments.
• 12:26
  Speaker 2: So essentially, salesforce is just like a single source of truth for like any business or anything that you need really yeah so there's lots of different like clouds for salesforce sales, different types of clouds.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: So for me personally, when I first started I focused on sales cloud, which is like one of the base, more basic kind of packages that sales was offer.
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: But they do like education cloud, they do non-for-profit cloud, they do engineering cloud, they do like service cloud.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: There's lots of different special like specialties that you can kind of go into and that's where that kind of layers of being able to upskill and progress come into it, because with salesforce you do certifications so to gain, like you, to become accredited, you do salesforce exams and the more you pass, obviously, the more um credited experience that you've got so that then you can put yourself forward for more kind of different roles and different opportunities because you've got that experience.
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: So for me personally, I started just doing like sales and service cloud.
• 13:28
  Speaker 2: They're the first two that I kind of started on and the majority of my customers were all running sales and service cloud.
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: I moved into a consultancy company.
• 13:36
  Speaker 2: So the consultancy company that I work for a bigger one like bigger than the one I originally started with.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: The reason I wanted to move to a bigger consultancy company was because of the range of experience that you get in terms of being accessed to just loads and loads of different project portfolios.
• 13:51
  Speaker 2: So I started at my current role with just having like sales and service cloud.
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: But I'm now marketing cloud certified.
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: So I'm a marketing cloud like associate consultant because I've got that experience, because I've had that experience and I kind of looked at my customers and Pardot slash account engagement was a product that a lot of my customers were buying and utilizing and so I was like, okay, let me get, let me have a little look into it.
• 14:17
  Speaker 2: This, this, like what does this do?
• 14:18
  Speaker 2: And I was really lucky again in the consultancy that I'm in is that we've got skilled consultants in those areas.
• 14:25
  Speaker 2: So I kind of shadowed a couple of our consultants and said like, okay, so what is this?
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: How does this work?
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: How would I fix this?
• 14:30
  Speaker 2: And I kind of really understood it and just enjoyed doing it.
• 14:35
  Speaker 2: So again, again, that was something for me that I could go down like I could follow.
• 14:39
  Speaker 2: That was an interest for me and I can make myself stand out a little bit on my CV because I've now got sales, I'm sales certified and I'm also a marketing cloud engage like engagement specialist.
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: So again, that's another string to kind of my CV that I've got to build kind of my job prospects in the future.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: So you are integrating and customising the systems on behalf of your clients, depending on what they need.
• 15:55
  Speaker 1: Is that right?
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, so currently the what I my role within the consultancy company that I'm in at the minute.
• 16:02
  Speaker 2: So I'm an associate consultant day-to-day.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: That means I'm part of kind of the managed service and fast start squad so I'm responsible for kind of doing different types of projects.
• 16:14
  Speaker 2: So managed service projects are people who have got salesforce.
• 16:17
  Speaker 2: They're generally customers that we've installed salesforce for, but they haven't got anybody internally with the knowledge to kind of enhance the system.
• 16:24
  Speaker 2: So you can imagine, because it's so unique and it's so tailored, we we create salesforce environments for customers and then they might start using it and going.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: Actually that doesn't quite do what we want it to do.
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Can we change this, can we do that?
• 16:36
  Speaker 2: And those companies might not have anybody internally to kind of help them with those little amendments, those little niggles, those kind of enhancing those processes.
• 16:45
  Speaker 2: So as part of the managed service team I'm responsible for kind of like sometimes firefighting.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: So last week I had it where someone emailed me like my whole sales system's gone down or our marketing cloud isn't working.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: These emails aren't triggering.
• 16:57
  Speaker 2: So a little bit of firefighting.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: So being reactive to tickets coming in, also kind of just supporting with things like building reports, building dashboards, setting new users up.
• 17:06
  Speaker 2: It's just dependent on kind of the customer and what needs they have.
• 17:09
  Speaker 2: They might have somebody internally that is quite good at the basic things but just need a little bit of help with the more complex items.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: And as daunting as it was for me to begin with, it's like it comes with practice, like the more you are in the system and the more you're using it, the more confident you you get.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: So you're kind of confident to kind of be able to do those things for customers.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: When I before I started with supermums I'd never even looked at salesforce from an end user perspective.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: I had no idea what it was.
• 17:38
  Speaker 2: I didn't know what it looked like.
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: I had no idea why people would use it.
• 17:42
  Speaker 2: I worked in education.
• 17:43
  Speaker 2: That was not something that salesforce was kind of used.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: I was in a charity preschool so we didn't.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: I was never an end user of Salesforce, never used it before.
• 17:52
  Speaker 2: I never had any idea of what it did.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: So for me the Supermums course was really beneficial because I got that kind of guided learning so you can learn Salesforce online.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: They've got a really good like training website called trailhead so technically you could just go on to trailhead.
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: Anybody can set up an account and just start learning salesforce.
• 18:14
  Speaker 2: You can do that straight away and you can just start working your way through, like guided learning modules and working with salesforce.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: For me, I'd never used it before, so I didn't understand it.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no, I've never used it before yeah, yeah, I just didn't get it and as much as I was doing the trail heads, it wasn't sinking in.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I was working full-time.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: I was trying to re-qualify and it was you then thinking or you weren't going to do it at that point.
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: You think I'm going to throw the towel in?
• 18:39
  Speaker 2: yeah, I'd put it off for about nine or ten months.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: My husband was like just do it, just get it done, just go through the trail heads and you can do it.
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: And I'd been doing it and I'd been Did he do super dancing, yeah.
• 18:50
  Speaker 2: So he did the Supermums course and I said to him I was like this is just not sinking in, like I'm working full time.
• 18:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're working full time, it's difficult, isn't it?
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: So I had a child.
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: I had like a child and I was trying to balance that kind of still having a life and not trying to like get inundated with everything else and eventually got to the point where I had to make a decision if I was going to invest like the supermoms course is a paid for course and I viewed it that I was investing in my future if I invested in it.
• 19:20
  Speaker 2: I felt that I would make sure that I had that return on investment like I would actually do it.
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: I would hold myself accountable better because I was actively having to pay to do the course rather than just doing it free and just kind of do the trailheads as and when.
• 19:35
  Speaker 2: And for me the kind of group learning was much better because we had a mentor, we had a group leader every week.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: We had also had my cohort of students who some of them were actually Salesforce, whose companies had paid for them to do the Supermums course because they wanted somebody internally so I could use them to ask questions.
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: I had my mentor to ask questions.
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: I had my obviously really lucky husband to ask questions too, but I felt that it really helped me kind of solidify my learning because I was doing it week on, week out, and at the end of the Superm programme you're put onto a pro bono project, which was really really good for me, because you take all of that learning, you kind of work through 12 weeks worth of guided learning and then, once you've got to a stage where they kind of sign you off, you can be let loose onto a project.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: Which was daunting in itself, but it was really good because then I could actually put my skills into practice yeah, probably it's a nice amount of time because you probably feel you've got learned a lot in 12 weeks.
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: Obviously, in 12 weeks, yeah, you're probably just about the right point, you know, to let let go in a live environment.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, so that that for me gave me that confidence to kind of that those skills and that confidence to kind of be able to go okay, right, this is fine, I can do this.
• 20:51
  Speaker 2: And on the back of my pro bono work I was like, actually, right, this is this is me now, like I could, I can do this, I really can do.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: That.
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: That's when I started looking for a job, because I thought I've signed, been signed off on my coursework, I've managed to pass my pro bono project, like my pro bono stuff, and the feedback and the comments that I had from my pro bono project were really great and I thought, right, this is it, I can do this now, like I've got the skills, I've got the foundations and it's just getting into a system and doing it and learning and doing and learning and learning and learning, and it's constantly learning and adapting to put it into practice.
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: So for me, that was kind of the way that I got into sales was to say absolutely no idea, never even heard of it before my husband did it.
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: Um, I think I heard a bit until I met Heather.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: But now actually I do see, and even earlier I got um, I've been losing with somebody that's been trying to sell me some software and then I noticed on their email it's got the end of it.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: It's all salesforce, so it's supposed to be calling through that.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you'll start to see it.
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: So there's a couple of times that I've logged into like websites to ask for help and stuff.
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: I'm like, oh, this is a support ticket for uh, this is a case.
• 21:58
  Speaker 2: I'm creating a case in salesforce for these, for this customer service.
• 22:01
  Speaker 2: So, yeah, so it's good.
• 22:02
  Speaker 2: You can kind of like you say you can see it in the real world as well yeah, absolutely so.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: What hooks did, of course.
• 22:07
  Speaker 1: Then how's the course structured?
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: Were you able to continue working?
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: yes for me.
• 22:12
  Speaker 2: I wasn't able to give up work.
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: I had to carry on working.
• 22:15
  Speaker 2: So the course I did at the time.
• 22:17
  Speaker 2: So I believe that now they've got courses that run in the evenings but at the time when I did the supermums course it was on like a Thursday morning for like two hours on a Thursday morning.
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: Unfortunately, I couldn't commit to that, to that.
• 22:29
  Speaker 2: So with work, with working where I was at the preschool, I had to be in work, I had to be in ratio.
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: So they record all of the sessions.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: So at the weekend I would just catch up with the recording and then work through the trailheads and I had to be really kind of focused on.
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: This isn't my investment, I have to ring fence that time.
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: So on a Saturday morning morning it was like my husband and my child were like left the house and I was like you need to like vacate because I cannot concentrate if you're both here.
• 22:55
  Speaker 2: So they would go out for a couple of hours and that was my kind of time to get my work done.
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: So I would like do the majority of my work on a Saturday morning and then like ad hoc trailheads and learning kind of of an evening, tried not to let it impact my evening too much, like when my son had gone to bed.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: I'd try and do it then.
• 23:12
  Speaker 2: So I wasn't trying to get it done while trying to cook dinner and things like that.
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: I could actually focus on it.
• 23:17
  Speaker 2: So for me, I did it at the weekend, so I did it on a Saturday morning 12.
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: It's only 12 weeks, isn't it really yeah yeah, exactly, and it wasn't.
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: It was term time only, so for me during the during the holidays, I could cram in a bit more because I didn't work during the holidays.
• 23:31
  Speaker 2: So I put my child into like into like a club for a day and then just tried to.
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: If I was behind at any point, I could just try and catch up during the holidays because I wasn't working at that time.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: So that was really beneficial for me and like the support I had from my like the trainer that I had at the time.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: Like any questions questions I had, you could just like if there was any part of the learning that wasn't quite sinking in, I could reach out to my trainer for like a weekly catch-up.
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: I was also assigned a mentor.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: So you're assigned a mentor that you can ask who's working within the like Salesforce ecosystem, that you can ask like real, like scenarios that for me, like I need to understand the why, like okay, well, why would you do that?
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: What is the benefit of doing that?
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: So having a mentor to be able to ask those types of questions was really good for me because it just helped me get the understanding that I needed and, as I say, there was a couple of people that didn't quite make the deadline in our cohort that just needed a bit of extra time, and they were really great in just saying, hey, take a bit of extra time once you've done the 12 weeks, like if you need behind a little bit, then you can kind of catch up with yourself.
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: And then, until you've done the 12 weeks learning, you couldn't do the pro bono, so they didn't just let you loose with the pro bono customers, like if you haven't completed that kind of side of things, which I felt was quite good as well, because it meant that we were at a good level.
• 24:46
  Speaker 1: So what's the job like then for salesforce people?
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: You know, you find it.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: It's quite easy to get new jobs so it's.
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: I'm going to be really honest it's got harder, so it has got harder as more and more people are kind of qualifying into it.
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: I think that what the jobs that are coming up are more end user jobs.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: So the jobs that I'm seeing at the minute are um companies who might have installed salesforce and want somebody rather than relying on a consultancy company like we are want somebody that's going to come in kind of to work with them to kind of develop their Salesforce system.
• 25:19
  Speaker 2: It can be quite daunting looking at adverts, like I've noticed recently that some of like the entry jobs.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: So the entry job that I started at was a Salesforce administrator.
• 25:28
  Speaker 2: I started at a consultancy company a gold level consultancy company as a Salesforce administrator doing like managed service tickets, so just reacting to things as they came in.
• 25:38
  Speaker 2: As tickets were created I'd kind of work through them one-on-one and that for me was a really good kind of use of my time.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: That's exactly what I needed.
• 25:45
  Speaker 2: I just wanted to be able to turn up, turn my computer on, work for my tickets, close my laptop at the end of the day and then kind of move on from it, which is exactly what I kind of got with that role.
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: I could just work on tickets kind of as they came through.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: The tickets were really varied again because the customers are so varied in terms of the industries that you're working in it's never really the same.
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: Might be the same theme, but never really the same.
• 26:08
  Speaker 2: Like if you're creating reports and dashboards, what one customer what wants with reports is totally different to what somebody else wants.
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: So it's good in that sense is that you can kind of use your like, use your brain to kind of like engage your brain to do.
• 26:21
  Speaker 2: It's not repetitive in that way.
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: So it is kind of the job market is is really strong.
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: There are salesforce jobs.
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: It is quite competitive because of the, as I say, more and more people are qualifying into it.
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: But as a parent with previous life experience, I felt that that's what I kind of utilized in my interviews to kind of really help me be at the top of an employer's kind of list.
• 26:45
  Speaker 2: So I might not have a lot of salesforce skills, but salesforce can be taught.
• 26:49
  Speaker 2: It's those life skills in terms of being able to speak to customers and being proactive and building, be able to build rapport and conflict manage all of those life skills that I had previously already that I've learned through my career.
• 27:03
  Speaker 2: Doesn't matter if it was in the preschool or if it was child mining or if it was at the jewelers.
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: That's all really valid life experience that's brought.
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: That's helped me kind of with my salesforce career yeah, brilliant.
• 27:16
  Speaker 1: So what's next for you in your career then?
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Where do you see yourself going?
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure, to be honest.
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: As I say, I am at the minute kind of looking at marketing and the account engagement side of things.
• 27:27
  Speaker 2: That's something that really interests me.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: I, being from the like, coming from the preschool which was like non-profit, like the charity sector is always really appealing to me.
• 27:37
  Speaker 2: I understand, like I can understand, I can empathize, I can build rapport really easily with those customers because I have been running a charity before, so I kind of I can understand the frustrations there.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: So I really enjoy working with kind of charities and non-profits.
• 27:52
  Speaker 2: So eventually I think long term for me in the future would be to work at kind of a maybe a big charity helping with their sales force.
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: But for the time being it's just finding something, finding a cloud that I enjoy and, yeah, just finding a role, kind of just finding where I fit.
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: That's not, as I say, not potentially people management at the minute.
• 28:12
  Speaker 2: For me, people management I've been there, as I say, I've done that, but let's not say it will never happen, but right now I just I'm kind of just happy at system administrator or like that's kind of the level that I'm happy at right now.
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: Brilliant, so any regrets, then leaving the preschool and retraining the act right now.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: Brilliant.
• 28:31
  Speaker 2: So any regrets?
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: Then, leaving the preschool and retraining?
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: Um, no, I just I do miss the children.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: They were so cute.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Like, the only person I have at home these days is my husband, he's not as fun to talk to every day um, as much as the preschool as well.
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: We did have a lot of fun with those.
• 28:42
  Speaker 2: So, no, to be honest, for, as I said, where I've come in two years, from leaving the preschool to my career, where I am at now, I feel that I'm in a role where I'm like, played well for my job, education did not pay well and I have a really good work-life balance.
• 29:01
  Speaker 2: Yeah, makes a difference working from home yeah, the thing is I don't like I don't mind to commute like I would commute like one or two days a week.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: I quite like going into an office environment.
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: That's fine.
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: It's just the company that I'm at, like where the offices are is London and there's not a lot of people in there all the time.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: But going to see customers, I've been on customer visits and things like that and I've really enjoyed doing those types of things.
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: So no, literally no regrets, and just apart from not being able to see and have fun with preschoolers, I don't miss nappies, I don't miss anything like that.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Like that's fine?
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: Definitely not, Well.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, kate, for joining me today.
• 29:33
  Speaker 1: We'll put your LinkedIn connection URL, if that's okay, on the show notes.
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: If anyone wants to connect with you, we'll also put the details to Supermoms and the Supermoms websites.
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: If anyone is interested in exploring some of their training opportunities, they can do that.
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: I know that they're running, I think, a new training cohort in September and accepting applications now.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: So if you want a career change in September when the kids go back, now is the perfect time to start exploring.
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm more than happy.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: If anybody's got any additional questions about retraining and kind of what it's like, as I say, put my LinkedIn.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: So send me a message on LinkedIn.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: I'm happy to chat.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Brilliant well.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much, kate, for joining us today.
• 30:11
  Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to another episode of the Work it Like A Mum podcast.
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this episode, please rate, review and subscribe, and don't forget to share the link with a friend.
• 30:26
  Speaker 1: If you're on LinkedIn, please send me a connection request at Elizabeth Willett and let me know your thoughts on this week's episode.
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: You can also follow my recruitment site, investing in Women on LinkedIn, facebook and Instagram.
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: Until next time, keep on chasing your biggest dreams.