Geoff Barr

Country of origin: United Kingdom

Placement: G-Care Medical Ltd

The organisation I was in for my placement was a small business, so I was working in several different departments doing a range of activities.  During my time in the marketing department I was involved with liaising with an external designer who was producing a video and brochures to be used at a trade fair.  Along side this I liaised with a translation company worked on translating some of our brochures into Arabic - as many of the organisations customers are from the Middle East and I suggested that would be a sign of respect and also useful for them. Once the designers and translators had completed their tasks I worked closely with our printing company to make sure that these brochures would be printed in time for the staff to be able to take them to the trade fair.  In addition to this I was also involved with the promotion of a new product called “Gentleheat”, where I worked closely with external advertisers in design and price negotiation and I also wrote some newsletters to try to build some interest in the product.

Within the sales department I took the lead on sales for our “Gentleheat” product where I would talk clients through the benefits, and also try to help them with any problems that they were having.  With this product I was able to attend one of the biggest medical tradeshows in the world where I was able to talk to distributors from all over the world and help them to understand why they should be selling our product rather than any of the others currently in the market. 

The final department I worked in was the quality department where I was creating technical files, completing internal quality audits and conducting product research with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to see if the problems occurring in other products could be a potential problem for our product.  In addition I was also heavily involved in making sure that each employee’s training log was kept up to date and I introduced a new training matrix to keep track of all the training that each employee had– this allowed the company to see at a glance who needs training in certain areas. 

My placement was in a technical organisation, with the only business related staff being a receptionist, a quality manager and two accountants. With that in mind the experience I gained during my placement was excellent, as I was able to see first-hand how a small organisation ran.  I was very lucky to be able to work within several different departments gaining a wide variety of skills and developing an understanding about why certain things were done.  For example, when I was working within the quality department I helped to create several technical files for new products and I was both trained in how to go about completing a technical file, but also the importance of a technical file, especially to medical based products. 

My hope for my future employment is to own and run a cafe, whereby the majority of staff will have been previously homeless, or have been struggling financially.  However, while I want to start this as soon as possible I feel that I need to have more finance, and also more experience.  To rectify this I intend to gain my coffee shop experience while working part-time throughout the final year of my degree and then once I graduate I am looking to gain some people management skills ideally through employment in the retail industry.

Meanwhile the knowledge and experience that I have gained while working on my placement have been excellent in helping me to develop business skills that can be transferred to my future ventures.  Skills such as multi-tasking, system management and marketing will all help me immensely with my future career plans.