What has been important to you on your career journey?

What has underpinned my journey has been learning and curiosity. The curiosity to keep asking, what else? What else can I learn? What else can I know? What else is out there? Does this interest me? Is this thing going to shape me? So I kept exploring areas of interest, and things that I wanted to explore further took me down a certain path. Interestingly, all the way from being a help desk agent and serving end customers to now being a client account lead and managing clients, it was a human thread. I figured out that the thing that was actually fuelling me was the relationship aspect.

What kind of things do you look for in a potential employee during the hiring process?

I'm not looking for degrees, that's the first thing. This week I finalised an offer for somebody, and the interview process was not about what degrees they had. I was looking at two things. Again, curiosity. Then I was looking for this mindset of Kaizen - of continuous improvement.

We're not looking for perfection, we're looking for progress. So what does that look like for you? Are you waiting to hit everything before you share ideas? Are you the kind of person that's going to test continuously, correct, and have a much more agile way of doing things? Or are you going to take your time to take action? By then, the wind's gone, you've missed your chance.

What is your key piece of advice to someone who is just starting out in their first role?

The first piece of advice I give people in their first role is get up, be curious, ask questions, go and find out what you can add. Go and poke your nose into spaces, ask questions, share ideas. That's what people are looking for. It doesn't matter whether you know the skill or not, you'll learn it. It's that curiosity, and it's the openness to say, put me in there, give me a chance, let me see what I can make of it and where I can grow.

And the second part is learning. Be hungry. Just keep on learning - don't stop. Even if you're sat with your team having a cup of coffee, when you get up ask yourself - what are the two things I learned from this discussion?

How important is it to ask for feedback?

Feedback is a gift. When I think of some of the people who have truly thrived in our organisation, it's those that are hungry for feedback, that keep coming and asking for it. They take it like it's liquid gold and don't just sit with it. Instead they think, it's something that I'm going to apply, I'm going to test, I'm going to figure out how to pivot if I need to. When I think of my rock stars, it's those guys.