Category Development Executive Review

I am a Category Development Executive in the Category & Shopper Development Team within the Nestlé Waters business in the UK. This involves looking after the Bottled Water (and Soft Drinks, though we do not play significantly in this category yet) category, and analysing its performance on a regular basis, as well as our own within it. I am in charge of all the internal reporting of what is happening in the category - e.g. market share reports, insights, growth in sub-segments and pack formats, competitor activity, promotions analysis and more. From an external perspective, my team has regular contact with retailers to help them grow their fair share of the category, so a lot of the analysis that I do feeds in to the presentation decks for these meetings.

This role has completely challenged me as I had no prior experience of working and analysing large amounts of data within several different databases. I was also really unfamiliar with calculating and benchmarking key metrics like market share, something which I champion now. I have also significantly advanced my skills not only on the various database softwares but also on Excel - so much so that people now come to me asking to fix their formulas on problematic Excel spreadsheets. This analytical mindset and working with lots of data is something completely out of my comfort zone. I have also been challenged in terms of presenting to large groups of people, and keeping confidence in the information and data I am presenting instead of being scared of my lack of experience.

I have had so many incredible experiences as a result of this programme - none of which I would have been able to had I chosen the traditional university path. I realised that the academic side of this programme has been of less interest to me in comparison to the work-based learning, so I am extremely grateful for the fact that I have been able to rotate within 5 completely different jobs in the past 3 years; this has given me uncomparable work experience. The only downside I would say is the difficulty in managing the university and full-time workload.

The programme has been well structured from the start - with schedules for our university weeks given at the beginning of each year so as to be able to plan the work/life/university schedule for the full year. We are also given the deadlines for university assignments at the start of the year, so we can incorporate this into our planning. However these are sometimes susceptible to change which is sometimes communicated at the last minute.

I would say that I felt like there was more support at the beginning of the programme than now (I am in my third and final year). This seems to be due to the fact that the company has taken on more and more apprentices, that there is not as much individual focus as there used to be before. Also from a wider business perspective, there isn't a really great level of understanding of what the apprenticeship is, so most of the time our line managers and teams at work have no idea how much university work is waiting for us when we get home, and we often end up working over our contracted hours without any support time given to do university assignments at work. Whilst this is something we can arrange with our line managers, there is a certain uncomfortable feeling of asking for time during the work week to complete assignments, it doesn't feel like we can.

As each university week consists of a completely different module, we generally only meet lecturers for that one week, and then don't see them again. This means that we just get written feedback from them on our assignments once they have graded them following the module, but nothing more.

I feel that all the modules I have studied as part of the university degree have in some way shape or form helped overcome obstacles in the workplace, whether it was background knowledge, confidence boosting, or genuine practice for something that was done practically at work (e.g. negotiation training at university helped me with the practical element of this at a customer meeting at work)

There are several activities, in fact I am a member of the corporate on-site gym, which I frequent regularly at lunchtimes during the work day. There are also several opportunities for volunteering, charity support, and social activities are organised on a regular basis to celebrate achievements and to meet people from other businesses.

Yes

I would say it is a company that you can trust to take very good care of you. I feel privileged to have been on this sponsored degree programme alone, having come out of it with no university debt, a degree, and 3 years of really valuable work experience. I would also say that the flexible working is incredible, and the benefits are probably a lot better than most organisations.

Be yourself. Don't try to make it sound like you are the smartest person on the planet, of course your experiences and qualifications matter, but at the end of the day it is about whether you as a person are the right fit for the company. Show that you know about the company and care about its values and purpose, and demonstrate how you want to build on these.