Hi, I’m Rohan, one of the Sales Placements here at ProspectSoft. Today I’ll be telling you about my personal experience of building my confidence in the working world. During my time at the University of Reading, spanning a couple of years, I've experienced significant personal growth. Like many others, I've expanded not only in terms of knowledge but also in vital life skills, with confidence emerging as one of the most substantial areas of development.

For me personally, I experienced a lot of change over the past few years. I was a very shy kid throughout my childhood. I always liked to stay in my comfort zone and not really take many risks. However, university was a catalyst for me to slowly start developing my confidence as well as my social skills. Whether this was through meeting and living with new people or presenting projects in front of large groups, confidence was one thing that I found always helped and it was slowly improving day by day. I had developed confidence in a few different ways over the years with one of the first being my start in kickboxing. This is where I first started to learn how to be confident in my abilities and that was a feeling I wanted to have throughout my life. It made me realise that once you’ve put the time and effort into something, confidence will come alongside it. 

My job role in Sales at ProspectSoft was the next step in building my confidence. Towards the start of my placement, I was still fairly quiet and not confident in my abilities to make the cold calls required for the job. Since being here for a few months, I can confidently say I have honed my skills and improved greatly. There are numerous things I learnt but one thing that was crucial to me was the importance of perseverance. After a bad day or week, I would feel less confident in my abilities and doubt if Sales was even for me. However, I realised that if I persevered, I could still achieve my targets and go above and beyond what I thought I could do. Learning that a setback in my job could be overcome helped me massively as it inspired me to become more resilient in my day-to-day life and once again more confident to get the job done. 

The confidence I have gained over the past few years as well as the skills I have gained at this job are tools that will help me not only in my future career but also my whole life. Sales is a job role that I enjoy and can see myself doing so it will directly apply to that. The confidence I’ve gained will help with my final year at university for things like group projects or presentations that would need to be done. If I went back and compared the way I would do presentations at school versus now it is a night and day difference. The way I learnt to present myself and the way I speak about topics has changed drastically and has allowed me to be more successful in not only presentations but also the day to day calling required in this field.  

Throughout my time at ProspectSoft so far, my managers and the rest of the Sales team have been so helpful. Especially at the start when I had no idea about what I was doing, and asked a question every 10 minutes, they were always there to provide support. They took the time to make sure I would improve and understand whatever the situation was. Asking for help was something that I quickly learnt would be the best way to improve, and with my manager, we now have weekly one-to-one meetings which are very helpful in understanding exactly where my best performance is, what areas I can improve in and how I can improve. Confidence may not be something that comes easily to all but once you have put the work in and have a team as helpful as the one here at ProspectSoft, I’m sure it’ll be easy for anyone to pick it up just as I have. 

Overall, this placement opportunity has already been eye opening to the potential development that can be made in a short amount of time. Considering I’ve only reached just over halfway I look forward to seeing the difference from now until the end of this placement as well as the difference in me from the start of my first year at university. The difference in not only my confidence but also my ability to perform to the very best of my ability. I’ve developed a lot more than I would’ve thought initially in multiple ways like I’ve mentioned, confidence, perseverance and simply the ability to know when to ask for help. But these are all things that I will continue to develop and use for the rest of my life.