Hello, Internet.

So recently for planning we had to do a job shadow– or, essentially, going about someone’s job with them so you can see what it’s like. I haven’t decided what I want to do for a living, but I know I want to go to business school, so I decided to try and do a business-type job shadow.

I started by coming up with a few ideas for people who I could job shadow– I considered jobs that were interesting to me, and possible connections that I had. I eventually decided to job shadow John Gilson, the vice president of Cobs Bread and the dad of my bestest bud.

Prior to the actually doing the job shadow project, we had to come up with questions to potentially ask while there. This was my list:

– How did you get this job?
– What other jobs led to this job?
– What education and experience was required for this job?
– What’s your favourite thing about this job?
– What’s your least favourite thing about this job?
– What do you do in a day?
– Why do you like this job?
– What made you want this job?
– Have you always wanted to work in this field?
– What’s the most difficult part of your job?

Then it came time for the actual job shadow itself. I sat in on a couple of meetings and phone calls, and John explained to me how his job works– he handles finding locations for franchises, as well as helping find franchisees who will run said franchises.

Aside from that, I spent a little bit of time shadowing the financial controller (sort of the equvialent of my mum’s job), who was actually working on finishing up the script for a video that would be shown to new franchisees. I read a little bit of the script, which talked about some different topics that would be important to a potential franchisee, such as the cost of goods sold (or COGS).

After that, she and John actually had to film the video– or, more accurately, be filmed talking about the information in the script. I watched them filming it, spent a while putting letters into envelopes, and my job shadow was pretty much done.

After doing my job shadow, I sent a thank you letter to John.

I found it really interesting to do a job shadow and see a little bit more about how this sort of job works. While I still don’t have a definitive plan for what I want to do when I grow up, I’m feeling pretty good about the decision to study business, and I’m always happy to learn more about what working in business is like.

Toodles.