I’ve been in my new job for six weeks now, and I love it there! There has been a lot to learn with the new products, the computer systems, and how to talk to the customers, and selling with individual targets is very different to what I’m used to. Although we don’t do the hard sell, as we still want to make sure that the customer gets the right products for their needs, which is exactly what I’ve done for the last fourteen years.

The passion for what I did I had gone out of my last job as the stress and anxiety and the prospect of and actually having to deal with shoplifters was overshadowing everything else. I was starting to dread going to work before every shift. Not good and defiantly not healthy. The shoplifting incidents had got a lot worse over the last year due to the lockdowns and all the non-essential shops having to close temporarily. This meant that the shoplifters were getting more desperate and more brazen with their behaviour.

The first two weeks of my new job entailed learning the new products and systems in addition to their procedures and during the last four weeks, I have been actively selling. The first week that I sold things I didn’t have any individual targets, but I have had them since and they’ve been going up each week until they are more like the actual targets I will have from now on.

I am loving talking to the customers, finding out their needs, advising them on the best options for them and making sure that they get those products. My colleagues are warm and welcoming and also very helpful to me. My job is a 30-hour contract and includes being a key holder and I’m already being instructed in opening and closing even though I haven’t passed the graduation of my training, as two of the other staff have holidays booked this month. They had been booked in for May but both kindly postponed them as I hadn’t long started when they would be needing to take that time off and they didn’t think that it would be fair to me.

I am relishing being in a new place, learning new things about different products, meeting and speaking to different people and also discovering and learning new things about myself as well. Because it’s such a different environment from what I’m used to, I had got far too comfortable in my last role. As a result, I had become quite bored with being at work. There were no personal challenges for me to keep me interested so I was just going through the motions. I’m now excited and also feeling much more fulfilled about work.