Guest Blogger Colin - Microsoft Adventures

Saturday, 12th December 2009 0 Comments

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

12/10/09 Fourteenth Week

This week Corp (bosses from US) were in town so my management team had been working hard to produce the figures and paint the picture that Corp would be wanting to see. This meant that I had to produce some figures for my manager regarding the leads that we’d created last year which hadn’t been followed up by the sales team, as well as the ones we’d created this year and what their status was for both.

On Tuesday we ran though everyone’s work with our director who said whilst the figures were not perfect about the business story in the UK it painted a pretty good picture. It turned out on Wednesday that Corp had a slightly more positive assessment than this so the team was very happy to get off without too much of a brandishing from the chiefs. Wednesday evening I met up with one of our product ambassadors to discuss teaming up to push our online presence. The meeting went pretty well and we’ve both now got ‘take-aways’ that we need to go away and action.

Thursday came and at 11.30 we had an extremely senior manager come to talk to the interns and graduates. He was Vice President of EPG worldwide. This meant he was about 5 places from Steve Ballmer at the top. EPG is especially important as it is the segment that looks after the major corporate account that are worth millions of dollars to Microsoft every year. He spoke to us for an hour about his career and answered all manor of questions regarding Microsoft as a whole as well as career advice. Again another fantastic insight of very successful business people sharing their experience with the interns right at the start of their career.

With all the extra hours people had been putting in, my manager had decided that the offsite we had scheduled for team commitment settings needed livening up a bit. I was asked to organise this. I did a bit of research and eventually chose the National Shooting Centre to do some clay pigeon shooting. This was a fantastic venue and everyone really enjoyed the day, I’d recommend the site to anyone for a range of events. In the evening I went with the team for a pub dinner and chatted over a few beers. That evening when I got back to reading I saw Zane Lowe at a student night which was amazing, although the exact details of the evening are a touch hazy.

On Friday I had a presentation to give in an attempt to get on a team that will present to companies and panels nationwide about Millennials or Generation Y. These are people born between 1980 and 2000 which are now in and entering the workplace that have different agendas and expectations than their predecessors. Although my laptop crashed and I had no PowerPoint slides the presentation went well, I managed to add-lib enough relevant material that I was given a place on the team. I did a bit more work on my projects and finished the week early looking forward to a quieter weekend. Although there was talk of Thorpe Park on the Saturday!

Add a Comment 0 Comments