April Blog by the Technical Placement Students

This month has been very exciting for us placement students in the technical department. Alongside ongoing daily projects that keep us busy on a regular occasion, we attended the CMS Discovery Course, taught by our CEO. The CMS Discovery Course looked into our brand new product that we are promoting and has already proven to be very successful. It was really interesting to see what the company has achieved so far in terms of the brand new e-commerce and web solution products, and we're looking forward to being assigned work on projects related to them.

ProspectSoft is expanding rapidly and are incorporating more products into the company's portfolio and us placement students are able to learn vast amounts of knowledge! Being in the technical team, we need to learn how to use every product well, find the best solutions to deploy and enhance them and explore all the possibilities our clients could benefit from. It is great to get to expand our personal knowledge as well as getting new work opportunities and develop a more in-depth range of skills on my placement year.

We’re excited about all the new projects that are coming our way and looking forward to the challenge of working on something new and exciting......Time to get back to work now!!

Veronica Cucuiat and Christopher Penrose - Assistant Solution Developer

ProspectSoft Ltd wins 2010 National Council Work Experience Award

ProspectSoft has been named as one of the best places to get an internship after winning an award at the National Council for Work Experience (NCWE) Awards 2010 on Monday.

ProspectSoft beat off five other businesses to win the crown in the '10-250 employees' category. The winners were announced on Monday, where myself (Lorna) and the Marketing Manager, Patrick Johnson attended the NCWE Awards Ceremony 2010 at Merchants Taylors Hall in London. The whole event was truly remarkable and was a delight to attend! There was a real emphasis on how critical work experience is to both the student and company, and it really gave me a true insight into how beneficial it will be to my career that I have taken a year out of university to work at ProspectSoft.

Gordon McKenzie, director for the office for graduate opportunities for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills presented 23 NCWE Awards across 11 categories, rewarding companies that have demonstrated exceptional work placements, which make a real impact to both the undergraduate student and the business.

Heather Collier, director of the NCWE comments: “We’re now in the seventh year of the awards and their increasing popularity reflects the growing importance of work experience in allowing students to develop skills while providing companies a talent pool for recruitment. ProspectSoft demonstrated that the scheme is really working for the company in terms of long-term hires that are recruited from the programme. With more companies competing than ever before, they have done exceptionally well.”

Only in January did ProspectSoft win the “Best Small to Medium Sized Enterprise” Award at the RateMyPlacement Ceremony, so this was truely great news for the company!!!

March Blog

Hi All, this month I (Gemma) am taking my turn to write the blog.

The last month has proven to be very busy, with preparation for our March Business Growth workshops and several other marketing campaigns that are currently been worked on. With the Business Growth workshop just around the corner, it is great feeling to see that our hard work is really paying off.

January and February has also seen the start of our placement recruitment and everyone here is really excited to see some fresh new faces. The assessment days have been great fun and it is really great to meet everyone. As well as the placement recruitment, we have seen the return of last year’s placement’s, they have already settled in nicely and are playing an important part within ProspectSoft family.

Personally I have been working really hard building some great relationships with our partners who sell our software and providing general support. As well as our business growth workshop’s, the resellers have been busy preparing for there’s and the whole team has been working hard to support our partners. This has been good fun and something that stands me in good stead for the rest of my career.

This month has been packed with social nights, from cinema visits to nights out on the town and with a poker night next Friday at the Sales directors House which I am very much looking forward to.

My placement year has whizzed past and reflecting back on my time here so far, I am amazed at how much I have learnt and all the new challenges I have had the opportunity to encounter. Not only have I gained some invaluable experience but I am having lots of fun along the way.

January Blog

Sorry for the delay in the ProspectSoft Placement Blog, we hope that you’re having a great start to 2010! Last month, three members of the ProspectSoft team including myself; a current Marketing Placement student, the HR Manager and Managing Director attended the National Placement & Internship Award Ceremony. The Ceremony was put on by RateMyPlacement on the 21st of January at Oxford Brookes University and was a huge success as we won the ‘Best Small and Medium-sized Enterprise Award!’

Being a current placement, it was a great opportunity to go back to my university and mingle with placement students at other companies and to reunite with the Oxford Brookes Business Placement Team, who offered me great support when seeking a placement. Other attendees at the ceremony included the top UK universities and other leading recruiters.

ProspectSoft won the award due to the efforts myself and also Vicki Watmough; a current placement student in Channel Management put into gathering a case study of material demonstrating how great the ProspectSoft Placement scheme is! It was great to see that our efforts paid off! The judging panel also looked at the reviews submitted by past ProspectSoft Students on the RateMyPlacement website, which are also worth a read!

December Blog

Hi everyone,

December has been a very exciting time for ProspectSoft, partly due to Christmas being around the corner, whoop! But also as we have been nominated for the ‘Best Small or Medium-sized Enterprise’ by Rate My Placement! The nomination is due to the consistent level of positive reviews that have been submitted on Rate My Placement by past Students following their year at ProspectSoft.

To see the ProspectSoft Placement Student reviews which have contributed to the Rate My Placement nomination and to give you a better idea of what past placements have got up to in their year click here.

So, due to ProspectSoft’s competitive nature, us Placement Students have spent time creating an eye-catching PowerPoint presentation (including a rather embarrassing video) full of compelling evidence demonstrating the success of the ProspectSoft Placement Scheme. The case study consisted of various material conveying the resources which have been specifically designed to ensure that us students gain a wealth of experience from our year.

This included the ProspectSoft Placement Training Schedule and information on the Placement Appraisal/Academy scheme. We also included impressive statistics such as the growing number of placement students who have returned to ProspectSoft full-time and how a huge 60% of the ProspectSoft Senior Management Team consist of past placement students. So, we all have our fingers crossed that the judging panel is impressed enough to ensure that we win!!!!

We all attended the ProspectSoft Christmas Party last week where we were treated out by the company to a night out with some scrumptious festive food and a competitive game of bowling in High Wycombe followed with a bit of a boogy after at a nearby club, which was thoroughly enjoyed by us all!! We have also been doing lots of fun outings after work such as going to TGI Fridays, seeing the new Twilight film (which was adored by all the placement girls, including Matt the UK Sales Manager) and tonight we are off for a spot of shopping at the Christmas Market in Oxford. All in all, the ProspectSoft Placement students have been yet again working extremely hard this month and so won’t deny that we are very much looking forward to a holiday over Christmas and New Year!!

Happy Christmas from the ProspectSoft Placement Students!

November Blog

Sorry everybody for the delay in our Placement Blog! The last few months for us have been extremely busy getting stuck into our various positions within the company. We are all finding it hard to believe that we are already a quarter of the way through our placement year at ProspectSoft!

Following up on our last Blog, we experienced great success with the ProspectSoft Business Growth Workshop, which all the sales and marketing placement students contributed significantly towards. The event enabled us to utilise numerous sales and marketing strategies in the time running up to the event and during where we liaised with many potential customers, which was an exciting prospect for us all! It was truly a great team achievement, so we were all extremely happy that our hard work paid off by delivering some great sales opportunities for the company.

We are all in agreement that the amount of experience that we are gaining from our time at ProspectSoft has been greatly received by all and we are thriving on the increasing responsibility given to us on a daily basis. We recently had individual appraisals with our department mangers, where we were able to evaluate our progress to ensure that we are working to our best abilities and that we are enjoying our time at ProspectSoft, which there was no doubt about for any of us! It is clearly apparent that ProspectSoft takes great pride in their Placement Programme and our managers are therefore always willing to help us out. In our individual appraisals, we were each given the opportunity to set individual objectives and targets for ourselves so that we can measure our ongoing performance within the company, which is a great way for us to maximise our potential.

Every month we attend the company meeting where we are included in discussions on all areas of the business, which enables us to gain a real insight into areas of the business which may not be directly involved with. The ProspectSoft team always make great effort into arranging an array of social events, such as visits to the local pub, bowling, cinema trips and so on, which is a great contributing factor to our enjoyment as a placement at ProspectSoft. The hardworking, fun and dynamic atmosphere within ProspectSoft has enabled us to bond not just between us placement students but with the whole of the company!

On an individual perspective on what we have been getting up to:

Gemma in New Sales has become an expert in delivering web demonstrations of the ProspectSoft CRM software to potential customers across the country, whilst working hard arranging requirement meetings for our sales team with customers interested in ProspectSoft CRM and CMS. Gemma also provides great ongoing support and encouragement to our resellers to close more sales for the company.

Jeannine in Account Management has been working extremely hard liaising with ProspectSoft’s existing customers, keeping them happy by arranging strategic and usage reviews to ensure that they are getting the most out their CRM investment and sustaining our customer retention success. Jeannine has also been travelling out of the office to customers sites participating in post-implementation reviews, ensuring that customers who have just gone live with the ProspectSoft system are happy with the results.

Vicki has been working closely alongside ProspectSoft’s resellers assisting them in the organisation of their Business Growth Workshops and going out to assist in the running of their events. Vicki is a great support to the channel and helps them out on an ongoing basis to improve their sales and marketing strategies to deliver more sales for the company. Organising the recruitment for next years Sales and Marketing Placements has been another of Vicki’s task, which she is thoroughly enjoying!

Lorna has been undertaking various marketing activities, such as assisting in the delivery of the ProspectSoft LiveWire, which is the quarterly communication update to all of our resellers and assisting with any marketing queries they may have. Lorna has also been organising the recruitment of next years IT Support and Development placements and ensuring that all the universities are advertising our job specifications so that we receive lots of high quality job applicants this year!

Veronica and Chris, the Software Development Placements have been dealing with quite a few different projects recently, which they have been picking up in the past few weeks. Chris has been assigned a project which is worth about 10 weeks of development, which is pretty exciting and complex, whereas Veronica has been dealing with a lot of issues that has given her insight in a lot of different areas and allowed her to accumulate a lot of useful information. Chris and Veronica are starting to depend less and less on the help from the people around then, getting more independence and more confidence from our supervisors that they are doing the right things.

So as you can see, we are all thoroughly enjoying out placement experience at ProspectSoft – If you have any questions at all – please do not hesitate to drop us a comment and we will get back to you as soon as possible!