by Annika Morgan

Created on: April 13, 2010

Ah, the first job. That eye-opening experience into the 'grown-up' world, where one starts to learn about how to gain experience, get a good reference, how to put a resume together ... but before all of that comes that first phone call, trying to sound confident, "Hi, I'd like to apply for ..."

I had a paper round in high school, but the post-of-age world was different. Career days at school had taught us about presentation, about setting up a good resume and how to get good experience, and yet scanning all of the job ads in the newspapers indicated people with manual skills that I'd not learned yet, or office experience that I'd yet to obtain. How was one to get this valuable, mysterious thing known as 'experience'? My reference from the paper round was willing to back me as reliable and committed, but couldn't provide any information about my sales skills or my ability to type. I had to start from somewhere.

Finally a job caught my eye in the classifieds:

No experience? No worries!

Which was how I found myself as a door-to-door salesgirl promoting mobile phones and landlines. I might add that there was an interesting personality quirk to add to the mix: I had a phobia of speaking to people.

It seemed a straightforward role, and commission based at that, which meant you had to be motivated to do well - it was a whole other world for me. The hours were intensely long, something which I wouldn't come to realise until long afterwards - getting together at nine in the morning, an hour or so drive to our location, out knocking on doors until 8pm, and then after the drive back home, sales reporting and feedback. At the time I lived over an hour away from my office and getting home at midnight was not unusual. It was a struggle, but still I persisted - in a role where turnover was very high (a lot of people didn't turn up again after the first day) I managed to get through three months of it.

The job introduced a wide variety of places and personalities, most reluctant to allow someone to sell something to them. Saturdays, paradoxically, were my best days. There were some fascinating people I met along the way, and just talking to them I felt my eyes open about the world. Some weeks I barely scraped through with the sales targets, but admittedly it just wasn't working for me.

So, I didn't quite end up being a gun of a door-to-door salesgirl. But I did demonstrate a commitment and persistence to trying that seemed to bode well when I applied for a telesales role after that stint - office work, which then led to other things. Certainly an interesting start, and one that prepared me well for being able to deal with a variety of personalities and situations - I'd managed to get over my fear of speaking to people, or at least had learned to manage that fear - knocking on sixty doors a day and frequent rejections will do that for one's ability to face up to the small adversities of life.

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