Mar 25 2011
Greatest Lesson from Someone Else
As you can tell, most students are either pretty lazy (maybe just me) or really keen and involved in school. I once was pretty skeptical about finding part-time jobs and even volunteer work because I thought it wouldn’t really “build” my career path (like I mean, volunteering wouldn’t really have anything to do in my future), but apparently I proved myself wrong after spending so much time on extracurricular activities in high school.
I laid my hands down on my first part-time job during grade 12 two years ago. Initially my reason for working somewhere was just to earn money with my spare time and also to have something to fill up the gaps on the Sauder application form. It was pretty scary at first, I mean working with people that I didn’t know and I didn’t have any experience at all. But after a while I started liking working as a team and attempted to satisfy each customer that we had. We had good times, when customers phoned back and giving us constructive feedback, and bad times when customers called back and ranted on us for mistakenly taken their orders.
While having fun and enjoying my first part-time job, I learned so much about working as a team and how to manage relationships with other employees. My manager is who I believe made the job fun and not-that-intimidating anymore because she cared about teaching us these things. Personally speaking, even though I wouldn’t really recommend working in a fast food chain, the experience that I had there was totally different from working with a student team in school. I didn’t even notice that these are certain aspects of OBHR until I took the course last term. Other than the OBHR stuff that she taught me, I also learned from her about managing the logistics of the items that we had in our store (which was also another great experience that I didn’t expect to learn at a fastfood chain).
If you have to ask who I learned the greatest lesson in my whole life from, my parents would totally qualify for it since they’ve taught me a lot since I was born. But in terms of working in a real job environment, I would have to say it’d be the manager of my first job.