| Welcome to 🍏Lunch n Learn with Lindsay🍏 Issue 248. Last week I was excited to hear from our Essential PA Programme Graduate, Kerry Cockburn that she has recently secured a new position as a Senior Personal Assistant (SPA) at John Lewis & Partners. Kerry explained that her Graduate status had definitely supported her during the interview process and had enabled her to add further depth to her interview examples. I am always so proud to hear from our Graduates on their successes so I met virtually with Kerry to congratulate her and find out more. I’m sure you’ll find the meeting transcript that follows hugely inspiring. And, if you or one of your team members is interested in this Qualification Programme or our Mini MBA Programme, just let me know. We’d love to support you. Lindsay: Hi Kerry! It’s great to see you online! Congratulations on your recent promotion – this is so exciting! Thank you for agreeing to chat with me and share this content on an email out to our followers. Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Kerry: Of course. I’m Kerry and I’ve worked for John Lewis & Partners for 11 years now. I have worked in various management roles across the business before securing my first PA role in December 2021. Lindsay: Can you share some info on your career and learning journey so far and let us know how The Essential PA Programme helped you at the interview stage for your new Senior PA role please? Kerry: During my time as a PA, I’ve supported various leaders in ‘Head Of’ roles before securing my recent promotion as Senior PA to the Director of Home and the Director of Content Design. I completed The Essential PA Programme in February 2025 after starting the course in Autumn 2024. I found the Programme really valuable. Because I was already an existing PA, a lot of the information validated what I already knew, but the Project Management Unit and Effective Workload Management Unit, which included learning on boundary setting, were particularly useful to me. During the interview process for my current Senior PA role, I was asked to give examples around times that I have worked effectively with challenging Leaders as well as times that I have used my initiative when it comes to taking on a project or task. I had taken some useful information from The Essential PA Programme in terms of learning how to push back and saying “No”effectively when needed, and I applied this in the interview. I was also able to give examples of times that I have supported with project management, partly as a result of my learnings from that Unit. Lindsay : This is so great to hear Kerry! You definitely applied that quote we share from Anton Chekhov “Learning is of no value unless you put it into practice”and your promotion is evidence of the benefit of this. Huge congratulations and we wish you much success in your new role. |
