#GradStories Sarah Rowntree, Kingspan

What does a typical day look like for you?

I work as part of the central customer experience team. We help businesses gather customer feedback that they can then take action on. My job is about supporting businesses with those cs measures. I do everything from collecting customer data to building dashboards, programming measurement tools, launching surveys and walking through results with those businesses.

What are the main skills you need to be successful in your roles?

You need good communication skills as you are working with many people who speak many different languages. This can be challenging at times, but if you have good communication skills, it really does pay off.

You also need good organisation skills. You’ll be dealing with multiple projects at a time which could be at different stages. You need to know how to juggle the workload and prioritise.

What was your career break?

I studied communication studies at DCU. When I graduated I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I reached out to Kingspan looking for a job and I sat down with a person who was part of the digital team. We discussed what the digital team was about, and it really intrigued me. There wasn’t a job available with them at the time but a couple of months down the line, a job became available in the customer experience team, which is part of the digital team. I applied, interviewed and got the job!

What advice would you give to a student?

Push yourself out of your comfort zone, explore things that you find interesting and introduce yourself to people you have similar interests with.

When I was in college, I had a day when I had no classes, I reached out to a few businesses and landed an internship with a travel media company. This helped me figure out what I wanted to do and gain experience in an office environment.

How have you adjusted to working from home?

I found it easy to adjust to working from home. A lot of my meetings are over video call. Luckily my office was open for a part of the pandemic, there was a period where I was working from home but would go into the office once or twice a week which broke it up a bit for me.

What do you like about your job?

You learn a lot about the customer’s perception of a business. Since we launched our customer experience programme within Kingspan, we have seen a lot of engagement with it. You can see changes happening within businesses thanks to the customer feedback that we gathered.

What did you love about the Kingspan graduate programme?

I joined the Kingspan graduate programme about a month after I joined Kingspan. The great thing about the graduate programme is that you have a permanent position from the start and the modules that you do on the graduate programme are about enhancing your skills and setting you up for success in your role.