If you haven’t yet seen it, I highly recommend popping over to our Facebook page and taking a watch. Alternatively, you can see this in full on our YouTube channel. If you prefer to read, you'll find our transcription of the interview below.
Christina Hello, everyone, we are live from Dolphin Outsourcing. I'm Christina Barker and I have the lovely Zara Roberts with us today who is one of our team members.
Today, I'd like to ask Zara a few questions so we can get to know her a little bit better. Tell us about you and your career so far.
Zara Gosh, it's been a long one. I actually started in NVQ's, back when I was 16 years old. So straight out of school, into the working environment in administration. Since then, I've had a couple of career changes. I have worked within the medical and legal sectors, within education and also in local government, doing administrative tasks from PA work to secretarial to general admin and even reception work. I've done a bit of everything within the administration sector.
Christina You've covered it all. Zara is very, very knowledgeable in that area. So tell us about you personally, what are your interests? What do you kind of do in your spare time?
Zara I love animals, any animal, I love it. I have a friend who owns a smallholding and before COVID hit and we went into lockdown I would go and help out with the animals and spend time with them. I was lucky enough to help birth a goat last year during lockdown because she needed some support. I'm a mum, I've got a 10-year-old daughter, and I have two rabbits who I absolutely love. They are my little fur babies.
Christina What are their names?
Zara I've got a large white one called Oreo. And a very small little brown one called Bean, both named by my daughter.
Christina So what do you do for Dolphin Outsourcing on a day to day basis?
Zara So I do quite a variety of things for Dolphin. I do general administration work, so I undertake research for my clients, email management; so sorting out their inboxes for them, diary management and I undertake some social media work as well. Social Media is an area that I'm still learning more about as it's not something I've had a huge amount of experience in. Saying that I absolutely love doing it.
I do a lot on a daily basis, it's so varied, every day is totally different and I just love learning new skills. It's been a whirlwind learning experience since April last year when I started but I've loved every minute of it.
Christina Have you got any courses coming up that you have an interest in or have you completed anything recently?
Zara I'm currently doing a certification for MailerLite which that goes through everything from setting up an account to segmentations of your client lists to campaigns. I've done an intensive course on Active Campaign within the last three months, which totally blew my mind seeing how much it can actually do for a client. I've got a LinkedIn course in the pipeline, as well as a Dubsado course, so I'm really cramming in the knowledge.
Christina How are you finding those courses at the minute? Are they okay? Are they sort of easy, difficult?
Zara Some parts of it are easy, but I think that's because of my background and I understand some parts of it. But there are other aspects that, because it's not something that I've done in any other job previously, it is a bit of a learning curve. But it's been really fun to learn what the clients are using on a daily basis and be able to offer them more support and be able to suggest to them certain things that maybe they're not using within that software that would benefit them and their businesses.
Christina Yeah, that's it. I mean, the more knowledge that we've got as a team, the more knowledge we can give to our clients as well. So we're always kind of looking for new things to do when something new comes out. One of us will be testing something or doing a course on something so we can pass that onto our clients. So it's good to have a big sort of pot in the way of things we can actually do is in it.
Zara Definitely, and we can share that knowledge with the team as well. So yeah, that's really good for them helping their clients as well, if they say, oh, have you heard of this? So it's good for knowledge sharing as well within the team?
Christina So talking of the team, where do you see yourself being with Dolphin in the next 12 months from now?
Zara For me, I'd like to still be here with Dolphin, training new team members as, hopefully, within the next 12 months, we can expand even more. But I also want to help more clients and help their businesses to grow online because we're seeing such a demand for online services and businesses at the moment, with the situation we're in and being able to help people is kind of where I see myself.
Christina So what makes you stand out from the crowd? What makes you different from somebody else?
Zara I have a can-do attitude. I'm always prepared to learn. If I don't know something, I will learn it so that I can support you and the business in the best way possible. I just love helping people. I just love learning and I have been called a sponge in the past because I sponge information, I want to know more and more. This is good for the clients as they know that I'm prepared to put my all into an assignment. I give you everything. So everything I can you can have.
Christina Let’s talk about social media platforms. Which one's your favourite? Do you have a certain one?
Zara I would have said, you know, everyone goes for Facebook, because it's been around for such a long time or Instagram but I'm actually liking LinkedIn at the moment. I'm enjoying learning more about it because I believe its an untapped platform and it's dedicated to people and businesses.
Christina So do you have the most experience in LinkedIn or is it a different platform that you've got the most experience in?
Zara
So for the most experience I'd say it's probably Instagram and Facebook, they are the two main ones that I personally use but my knowledge on LinkedIn is growing day by day, and I'm really looking forward to my LinkedIn course that I'm going to be doing shortly, to expand that knowledge even further.
Christina Well, it's looking good at the moment as I had a look at your account the other day and is looking all shiny and new. We'll finish off then with one more thing. Can you tell us one fun fact about yourself?
Zara Oh, one fun fact. I am extremely hypermobile so I have very flexible joints. I can do some very strange things with my joints, I won't demonstrate it, it doesn't look very nice and it would put people off quite a lot. But yeah, I'm very, very flexible.
Christina If you would like to work with Zara, get in touch with us or get in touch with Zara. You can speak to her on LinkedIn and we'll see how we can help you in your business.
You can watch the interview in full on our YouTube channel above, or, if you prefer to listen, you can do so on our podcast. Listen on Spotify Listen on Apple Podcasts.