What's your name?

I prefer to stay anonymous

And what do you do for work?

Director of a Mystery Shopping Department

Do you enjoy it? (+ why/why not?)

Very much - I am using my expertise to help organisations improve their output - my clients are grateful, I see real results and I enjoy planning and executing the projects

What are good signs that someone might enjoy doing what you do and be good at it?

When clients see their bottom line increases

Did you always know you wanted to do what you do?

No, I loved research and wanted to do something with it that would actually make a difference to companies

What else did you consider doing?

Teaching

Any advice for someone who does know they want to do what you do?

Work on your presentation skills as well as the research skills

Are there any misconceptions people might have about what it's like to do what you do?

They think its just easy to design the projects, but actually you need the mystery shoppers to appear natural and not be spotted, yet you need to extract a huge amount of data, so you need to be able to produce a scenario and script that is easy to memorise and execute whilst giving a lot of useful data, It's not as straight forward as people think