New World. New Skills - Sarah Moore's story

Sarah Moore: My name is Sarah Moore, and I’m the Head of Purpose for PwC. I’ve just spoken to about 30 students, and that’s part of our New World New Skills Programme. The programme is about helping and supporting people that come from a lower social economic background or a social mobility cold spot. Learn new skills that can help them be successful in the workplace in the future. It’s a really meaningful programme to me, because when I started out in my professional career, I really didn’t know what to expect. I went to drama school, I went to a low-ranking university college, if you like. For me, when I entered the workplace, I didn’t have what I thought were the skills that I needed to succeed, so traditional skills around accounting and financial acumen, which of course, are incredibly important. What I did have but didn’t appreciate at the time, are skills around relationship building, negotiation, building common ground, innovation, and it was only through help and coaching and mentoring when I was here at PwC that I realised these are skills that I really should be valuing in myself and actually are very beneficial to others. All of my part time jobs that I had did teach me about relationship skills, accounting and financial skills when I was running my mini babysitting business. Huge innovation and creativity around, where’s the next pound coming from, and how am I going to earn that, or where can I create value, and what did that feel like. I’m evidence of, you can take the skills that you have, that you might have learnt through other means, maybe not means that you’ve learnt on a formal professional internship, but through jobs or life experiences, and really use them to help you moving forward. Where you started out should not be the thing that hold you back from where you go, but actually, it could be the thing that fuels you or encourages you and you learn from that and take it with you.