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My name is Christiana.

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My job title is an assistant company secretary.

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I work for a company called Tritax and we’re based in London.

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The best way to describe the job

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of a assistant company secretary is to support the business

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in ensuring that it runs in accordance with the laws and regulations.

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In essence, our job is to make sure that the business is run well.

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A really good skill to have is prioritisation,

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really good time management.

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You have to have a strong expertise in company law, in company administration.

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You also need to be familiar with the way boards operate, because as much as you

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do a lot of company administration, it’s a strategic and it’s an advisory role.

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So you need to understand risk.

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You need to understand how people develop strategies.

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And you also need to understand how people work together.

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And if I relate that back to being in school…

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Imagine doing a group project and there’s always one person who doesn’t

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quite pull their weight, and one person who tells everybody

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what they need to be doing, and one person who sort of goes with it.

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Not saying that’s exactly what you find at companies, but it’s how you work with different people.

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I studied geography

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during my A-level times, and I went to university and studied geography again,

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and wanted to go back and do a PhD in geography.

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So there was a lot of geography in the background.

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I realised that I probably needed some real-world experience.

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So I took time out, did a little bit of traveling for three months,

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nothing major,

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came back and realised I needed to gain some useful employment.

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So I went to a recruitment office and asked for some sort of office temp roles,

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while I figured out what kind of research I wanted to do, because at this stage

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I was very much going back to do a PhD. And a role came up,

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three months was great.

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Worked in a team with an amazing manager with three amazing women,

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and it was a governance team.

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And I absolutely fell in love with what they did.

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And completely changed my mind about what career path I wanted to choose.

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So no, when I left school, I did not think I’m going to be a company secretary.

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If I’m honest, I had no idea what a company secretary did.

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And everything changed when I took on my first corporate role.

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It’s in those moments where I had a lot of setbacks

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in trying to sort of navigate the new job market is where I leaned

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into good mentors, good sort of teachers that I’d had in the past,

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friends and family, to kind of push me back up

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and help me keep going and keep applying for those roles.

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It’s okay to not know what you want to do, and it’s okay

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to feel like you want to go down one career path and then change your mind.

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Don’t give up because, you know,

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rejection is a part of life, and it’s very easy to

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feel defeated when something you worked so hard for and something

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that you thought you would have, doesn’t actually come your way.

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And there’s always a new opportunity on the horizon

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so keep pushing and keep going.