Halloween Social
(October 2005)
Thanks to all those who turned out on a scarily rainy Wednesday evening for R-Net's Halloween social in London! We raised money for Royal National Institute of the Blind's 'Scared Senseless' campaign and had a good chat with Louise Brice, Associate Director at MORI. With a varied and successful career in market research, Louise was able to give us an insightful view on the issues facing us young and new researchers. A summary of her advice for researchers starting out in their careers is as follows:
- Be enthusiastic, as a good attitude goes a long way towards making you easy and pleasant to work with. Your colleagues are more likely to involve you, so you will learn more and find it more interesting.
- Be prepared to do the odd late night to help people out. Teamwork is really valuable and you should show you are willing to go that little bit further to get the job done.
- Try to make things easier for your colleagues by remembering the little details, eg take the pressure off your boss for their next debrief by sorting out the laptop and projector, ordering the car etc. Again, it makes you a treasured member of the team.
- Ask questions and ask people to show you what they're doing, eg sit with a colleague as they write a presentation and get them to explain why they are doing it in a certain way.
- Don't be too daunted. Research can seem like a big complicated process, but you just need to break it down, focus on the questions that need to be answered and deduce the right approach from there, eg does the client want to understand, explore? In that case, they need qual research. Do they want to measure, prove? That calls for quant.
- The step between being a research exec and senior research exec is often about being able to use your own initiative. So if you're an RE, try to come up with a few ideas of your own before seeking guidance as this will be good practice and show you are ready for this next step in your career.
- Pro-actively seek feedback from your manager and your colleagues. This will speed up the learning curve: you can start improving straight away rather than waiting for your appraisal.
- Even if you think you've done a bad job, still ask others what they thought: no one is ever wholly negative in giving feedback so you'll hear something positive that'll make you feel better. It'll also help you ensure you don't make the same mistakes again because you can diagnose the specific bits that went wrong.
- By prompting a review of how things went, you'll get the chance to defend yourself if there were any extenuating circumstances. You will also get the opportunity to feed back to your manager or colleagues what they could have done differently to help you out.
We hope to see more of you all at R-Net's next presentation in November and the next social, in January.
We're still planning a regular calendar of R-Net events so if you've got any suggestions, let us know.
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