As this is my first blog its probably best that I introduce myself and briefly out line how I came to be on the Cadbury Graduate scheme.
My name is Graeme and I graduated from Edinburgh Uni in June 2006 with a Mechanical Engineering degree. I then went travelling for a year, had a fantastic time and many valuable ‘life experiences’ and arrived back in the UK too late for all the Sept ’07 graduate schemes. So this time last year I applied to quite a lot of the major graduate programmes, focusing mainly within FMCG and to cut a long story short, I was lucky enough to be offered a job with Cadbury at Christmas time. I was scheduled to start in September but decided that I would prefer to start sooner and as a result I moved to London and started in my first role, as a Grocery Sales Executive, at the end of March.
This role involved visiting Supermarkets, checking that Cadbury products were where they should be and trying to improve Cadbury’s presence in store. The key phrase that you hear over and over again about field sales, whether it’s dealing with supermarkets (Grocery) or smaller independent stores (Impulse), is that “its a great grounding in the business”, and its true. You’ll really quickly get a good understanding of our products and customers as well as developing some core selling skills. There are frustrating aspects to the role, especially wasting time sitting in traffic or trying to find the person you need in a huge store when you are under pressure to get all your visits done. However, overall I got on really well with my team mates, learnt a lot about Cadbury and the major retailers and enjoyed the satisfaction of successfully influencing people.
After almost five months in that role, the company restructured our sales force so it was an appropriate time to move to my next role, which I have now been in for 7 weeks. My new title is Grocery Space Planner and my main responsibility is to provide merchandising solutions (basically how products should be displayed) for the major Grocers. This is based at the Head Office in Uxbridge and a big part of what I’ve been doing so far in the role has just been meeting all the relevant people, finding out what they do and getting an understanding of how all the commercial departments and teams fit together.
I’m conscious that this is getting pretty long so I’ll save more info about my current role for my next entry. I’ll finish up though by saying that I remember reading the Cadbury Graduate’s blogs last year and being a bit cynical about how positive all the entries were. Now its my turn and I can honestly say that although there are parts of both roles that aren’t the best fun and there have been some Sunday nights where I didn’t really fancy working the next day, my overall experience has been really positive. I am delighted I came to work here; there is loads of opportunity to learn and work with great people and great brands, so I definitely recommend that you apply.
So best of luck and I’ll probably meet some of you soon.
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