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Melissa Gerritsen
HELLO I'M MELISSA
"KEEP ON SMILING"
WORK EXPERIENCE
In november 2016 I started as a Calco MasterClass Professional, I participate in a two-year traineeship in which I am being trained to become an IT professional. The first two months of the traineeship consist of an educational program at Calco’s headquarters in Maarssen. During this period I have gained knowledge about different functions and processes in IT and I will follow a specialisation course that matches my interests and skills (e.g. information analyst, programmer, tester or junior project manager). Besides that, an important part of the traineeship focuses on the development of soft skills, such as presentation and communication skills.
After the educational program has been completed, I will be working for one of our clients for a period of 22 months. Whilst working there I will further develop my skills on the job. A field manager from Calco will coach and supervise me during this period, and together we will create a personal development plan in order to continue my personal development while being on the job. After completing the 22 months, PostNL offered me the job and since November 2018 I've been their employee. At the end of 2019 our branch at PostNL was sold to Paragon Customer Communications. So since January 2020 I've been a Customer Implementation Consultant for Paragon. In the summer of 2022 I was promoted to a Senior Consultant.
At Paragon I'm part of the professional services team of the Consulting & Agency departement. We offer a service for other companies to take care of their multi-channel communication to their clients. This includes but is not limited to print, e-mail, and text messaging. I analyze customers in in their old situation on our old systems. A new platform is being build in-house and all the customers have to be migrated from the old ones to this new one. One-on-one migrations are rare so it is important that the old situation is analyzed properly before transferring to the new one.
In the Spring of 2016 I've completed an online marketing and communications internship at the Club Med Academies and their tennis head coach Gabe Jaramillo.
I have kept social media up-to-date by taking pictures and developing posts. I created marketing material in the form of brochures, flyers, and instruction manuals. I've improved both Gabe's and the Club med Academies' websites through Wordpress. I helped creating weekly newsletters. I attended coaches, operational, and sales meetings. I assisted the tennis director with recording and transcribing monthly interviews with professionals in the tennis world. And I traveled to ATP and WTA tournaments and supervised students.
The summer of 2014 I was a communications intern for three months for the company Appvanced, located in Amsterdam. Appvanced is a full-service interactive agency specialized in mobile applications, like apps for smart phones and tablets. These can be created for iOS, Android, Windows Phones, mobile and web. They develop these applications at the request of other organisations, and they recently developed their own white-label app and placed it on the market.
I had the tasks to keep their social media (Facebook/Twitter) and website through wordpress up-to-date. I have written many texts for their website in Dutch and later I translated the whole website to English to reach a larger audience. Also, I've build a demo website for a newspaper client of Appvanced. Next to translating their website, I translated many other kinds of texts, like newsletters, fact sheets, and a master agreement. Finally I created a brochure using InDesign. Appvanced created together with Diskad BV. a program called PublishOne. PublishOne is a system that makes the publication process of books, magazines etc. easier by creating an innovative editor environment and a custom ribbon for Microsoft Word. I translated the instruction manual fo PublishOne from Dutch to English and I also recorded step-by-step instruction videos for this program in English. Next to these I researched existing applications and I attended meetings about future applications and provided feedback for these.
After completing my internship in The Netherlands, Ellen the co-founder of Appvanced offered me a job for at least the next half a year, which eventually extended to a year. So even being in The United States, they would e-mail me tasks to do. I mostly translate various kinds of texts from Dutch to English, but also check Dutch and English texts for grammar and spelling mistakes. Next to this, I still update websites, for example the website of Diskad Concepts and PublishOne. I've learned many different things during my internship and the part-time job and I really enjoy this kind of work.
Next to my job at Appvanced, during the Fall of 2014 I worked as an undergraduate consultant in the Noel Studio for Academic Creativity located in the library of EKU. Since I have completed my undergrad and I have started my graduate degree in the Spring of 2015, I have moved from an undergraduate consultant to a graduate consultant. The Noel Studio is a place where creativity is stimulated and students, individually or in groups, can schedule appointments with consultants, who provide support with all kinds of projects. We help with papers and presentations, in all kinds of stages of completion. For example, brainstorming about topics, creating outlines, researching, drafting, and revising, citing sources according to the proper citation style, and provide help with different media located in the studio. I like helping other people and students, most of them just need that little extra push, or a fresh eye to go over their projects and this can mean a lot to a stressed out student.
