E52 - Jessica Meijer at VodafoneZiggo

On the 52nd episode our Director, James Dean, was joined by Jessica Meijer. Jessica is an international business professional with over 8 years of experience in corporate and start-up environments. Prior to her current position as a Senior Business Management Consultant at Rogha Consulting, she worked as the Business Process Improvement/Knowledge Specialist/Communication at VodafoneZiggo. During her career, she’s not shied to try out new opportunities. She walks us through why she thinks job hopping is important for personal development and growth.

If you take a look at her LinkedIn you will see a very chequered background. Working within different roles for various organisations, Jessica gained an abundance of transferable skills.

Four years ago, she came across VodafoneZiggo, when she applied for a Business Readiness Specialist role. Unsuccessful for that particular role, they did express a keenness to keep her in the loop. A year later they called her and said they had the perfect role for her. So, after applying and becoming successful in the process, she started a role there as a Knowledge Specialist.

With a variety of different positions under her belt, going from the financial industry, studying business and consumer psychology at university to working in the Telecoms space, she learned many skills that were heavily needed in each position. In the financial industry, she needed a lot of communication skills. She was then a financial advisor so had to give a lot of advice and had a lot of conversations. She believes communication skills were the key competency that got her a job as a Knowledge Specialist.

At university, she studied business but also consumer psychology. She did parts of consumer psychology and business and as a master’s degree did organisational learning and processes learning science. She gained vast more insight studying parts of communication persuasion and psychology than she ever did with the subjects in business.

With her background in her career being deemed as ‘all over the place’ and job hopping being deemed as a negative thing, Jessica thinks of it as quite the opposite. Job hopping implies you are not loyal, but Jessica says: “I’m so devoted to learning new things to develop myself in different areas.”

We are living in the future and, as technology becomes more advanced, it will permeate all parts of our lives. Some of the emerging technologies Jessica sees taking over the world are robotics combined with IoT. The human body and technology will merge, and this is something she is incredibly excited about. This will create more opportunities to learn, connect and grow.

Falling down is a part of learning to succeed. Some advice to those looking to enter the space is to go for it and not be scared to make the wrong choices. Jessica was always afraid that she would make the wrong choice and that it would be a disaster if she did but that isn’t true at all. It is good to make a wrong choice every now and then because that’s where you learn and grow. Trust your own decisions, even if it’s wrong as it’ll only make you stronger. With the limitless possibilities available today, there’s no reason to not take a chance and do something different.

Lastly, we land on our quick-fire round, she takes us through a series of brilliant answers from what people find surprising when they first meet her to one thing she believes in that everyone thinks she’s crazy for. Make sure you listen to the full episode to hear some of her great answers.