Chelsea Burton

Hi, my name is Chelsea. I graduated with a Bachelor of Behavioural Science in 2003. I started my career at McDonalds, actually, when I was 15 and I worked there for six years, I became the first part time manager when I turned 18 at McDonalds in Broadmeadows, that was a great experience, I learnt a lot in terms of policies and procedures, working under pressure and a variety of other things.

While I was at uni I decided that I wanted to get some other experience so I joined AAMI in a sales capacity. While I was there I learned a lot about selling and I was able to get into the top two sales people every single month. After I finished uni I was hired as a recruiter for a direct sales company selling Optus door to door and my job was to do phone screening for door to door salesmen. I had a target of ten people every single week and I was able to achieve 25 every single week so I was noticed and they promoted me pretty quickly to a national recruitment manager where my job was to train other people to do the same thing that I was doing. After a while they won a contract with World Vision to offer sponsorships door to door so they asked me to be the trainer, which was something that I had always wanted to do, so I became the National Recruitment and Training Manager.

From there I was head hunted by a guy who was starting up as an independent telecommunications broker, he was just starting out but he wanted to make it national and wanted to be the first completely independent telecommunications broker in the country. So I started work there as the General Manager and I was able to make that company national within one and a half years. I worked there for a little while but I was feeling a bit unfulfilled because I didn't get into behavioural science to sell telecommunications, I got into behavioural science to help people, so I took a job at Fitness First as a General Manager for three of their clubs where I worked for a year until I got pregnant. I was working 100 hour weeks and that and pregnancy didn't mesh very well so I decided to take a little bit of time off and do some temp work as a debt collector, so I did that until my son was born.

I was in hospital just after having my son, on the second day, and I got a phone call saying, "Hey, I hear you're out of work, how about you come and work for us?" and it was a brand new registered training organisation, they were just getting off the ground, they hadn't set any classes, they hadn't got any students, they were just in the process of creating the training and they wanted me to come on as their General Manager, HR and Finance Manager. So I took that role and we managed to make it a national training organisation within 12 months, and then I discovered a real passion for property so I changed roles again and I decided to move into a mortgage manager role as an Executive Assistant, I wanted to learn more about the Finance Industry and the finance behind mortgages so that seemed like a really good fit for me, and that's where I am now.

So what did I get out of my Behavioural Science Degree? I got two very important things. The first of them is an understanding of people, and the second was an understanding of statistics. So people, it gives you the ability to sell, it gives you the ability to manage and basically everything in life is sales. Sales is basically the concept of understanding what people want and what they need, and getting what you have in your skills to suit that. So everything in life is a sale, sales is everything from a child wanting a chocolate bar in a supermarket to you going for a job interview for you, handling a customer complaint, it's everything that we do in life, everything is a sale, so psychology really helped me to understand how to sell to people and that was a very, very important skill for me. In addition to that it taught me how to lead and how to manage people, the different types of leadership, the different types of power, the different ways to motivate people. All businesses have people and the way to get people to do what you want them to do is to do what they want you to do. You need to give them what they want in order for them to give you what you want and understanding that is key to motivating people. So basically I was able to develop different ways of managing people that suited their motivations, and finding out about their goals and their desires and by having them help me.

The other really important thing is understanding where the company is headed, the mission and the vision of the company, so that you can lead everybody towards a common goal. Businesses have psychology just as well as people do, so understanding what makes everybody in a business tick is the key to having a successful business. Outside of that I think that you've got to give in order to receive. Richard Kiyosaki says in his book, Rich Dad Poor Dad that money is like a river, the more you give the more you get, and I think that applies to life as well, and people as well as just money. If you give to people and you give to your staff then you'll get back from them what you want, and the more you give to them the more you're likely to get back and the more you will be supported.

In addition to that I also learnt a lot about statistics which taught me about the best ways of hitting targets, and developing targets, and developing KPIs for businesses, reporting on the success of a business and working out the gaps in a business and how to fill them. I did a lot in recruitment, and again recruitment is a sales role, so basically both the interviewer and the interviewee are in sales, so when you write a cover letter the cover letter has to be specific to the job, it's got to apply to what they're looking for, and it's got to show that you've looked into what they're looking for and that you've read what they're looking for. So, every cover letter should be really specific to the job and it should be a sales pitch to tell the interviewer why it is that they should hire you and why it is that they should recruit you. And really, importantly there should be no typos or grammatical errors, because in my experience what I used to do with resumes that had a typo was I would just throw them in the bin because I knew that that person didn't care enough to reread what they had written so why should I hire them.

Then you come to the interview, and in an interview, again it's a sale, it's really important to talk to your interviewer about what you have that they need, and what you have that they want, and they're going to be telling you about what they have that you want. Something that's really important in an interview, something that people do a lot of, is behavioural based interviewing. Basically that is the concept of looking at past behaviour to determine how you're going to behave in the future, so it's really important when you're in an interview that you're really confident about what you've done in the past and that you can explain it succinctly and be really specific about how you achieve the results and not how anybody else did. Something else that I found particularly useful from Behavioural Science was with statistics I was able to understand the property market and I've managed to buy six properties in the last 15 months. Basically the way that I've done that is understanding people movement, the gentrification, which is a process of wealthier people moving into a suburb and developing cafes and all that sort of thing. Also, what people are looking for in a property, what they're going to be looking for in rentals, where they're going to move to when certain suburbs get too expensive, so I found that statistics has been really instrumental in that.

So my advice to you is basically think outside the box, just because you're doing a Behavioural Science degree or a Psychology degree doesn't mean that you have to be a psychologist, there are lots of options, you've just got to look for them.