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Hi. My name is Maria.

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I’m currently an account manager apprentice at Amazon Web Services,

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also known as AWS.

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AWS is basically a giant

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subsidiary of Amazon, which I’m sure you all have heard of before.

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So instead of selling books and clothes online we sell IT services,

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for example, storage and compute power to a variety of different organisations.

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For me personally, I work in the Central Government Team,

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which means I’ve got my own set of accounts

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that I work with, and I’m responsible for maintaining relationships with them.

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Earning trust and basically, if the customer has a challenge figuring out

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if we’ve got any services that can help form a solution for that.

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I originally wanted to go to university.

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I wanted to study geography, picked all my A-levels according

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to what I wanted to do, according to my big plan, started

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actually studying and realised I’m not sure I want to do this for the rest of my life.

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And that made me really nervous.

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So I decided to look into different options.

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For me I decided that would be a gap year.

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So I flew to Australia and I had the best time ever.

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I was doing bartending, waitressing, traveling, having fun, enjoying myself.

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But then I came back after a year and a bit and thought

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I really would like to start building a career for myself,

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something that is stable and solid that I can use for the rest of my life.

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So I spoke to my sister who does a degree apprenticeship and she basically introduced me

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to the idea and told me about how I can get a degree for free.

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I can have a job and be in that corporate environment

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and get that experience but I don’t have to sacrifice the university lifestyle.

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I can still go out and make friends, go to lectures on campus

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and have that fun part of the life to.

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So I do think you need to be

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quite social for an account manager role as you need to earn the customer’s trust,

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you need to be able to talk to them and ask the right questions

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to find out what challenges they’re having to help you figure out a solution

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for them using AWS’s resources and services.

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But I think you also just need to, as an apprentice, not just an account

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manager, have the want and the willingness to learn and be curious

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and to want to message your customers and to keep up to date with them.

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One thing that I often got told when I said, you know, I’m

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going to go down this route and I’m not going to pay for uni,

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I’m going to have a great job working at a big company,

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and I’m not going to have any student debt.

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People constantly said that sounds great, but just be realistic.

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What do you actually want to do?

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You know, maybe just do something that’s safe and stable,

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and just take the traditional route to uni.

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So when people used to say to me, be realistic, you can’t actually find a role

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where you’ll be a manager at the end of it and get a free degree you know?

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And I found it and it does exist, and you’ve just got too have a little

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look online at the companies you like and the things that you enjoy doing.

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Don’t stick to the list of job roles that you know exist

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because there could be something out there that you’ve never heard of, like me

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that you end up doing and you really, really enjoy.