Beauty Manager
Virgin Active

Shahn G

00:00:03 My name is Shahn. I’m a Beauty Manager. I work for Virgin Active and I run two sites – one at Margate and one at The Strand. I look after all of the therapists that work at both of the sites, day to day running of the salon, making sure everybody has got what they need to do their job, doing accounts, stock takes, everything really, wages, holidays, everything for the two salons.

00:00:37 My mum is a secretary for a property developer – she works in London – and my dad works for BT. He’s an engineer. I’ve got an older sister, she’s three years older than me, she did her A levels and she left school after her A levels, went to university for three years, so she was very academic and did that side of things, but we’ve always been really different, so I was never sort of forced to stay on at school. My parents always just said ‘You’ve got to do what you want to do and what you’re going to be happy doing.’

00:01:13 My mum used to have someone come in and do her treatments at home, so I used to watch what she was doing to my mum and I used to think it looks quite a fun job, so then I decided to go to the college in London when I left school because that’s where she recommended for me to go. It was called London College of Fashion and they’re all over London. They do everything from fashion, fashion buying, beauty, theatrical make up, film make up, everything really, and they do a two-year fulltime beauty therapy course.

00:01:46 When I left college, because I’d been to college right on Oxford Street, so I was used to being up in London, I didn’t want to work anywhere small, so I basically just applied to all the big department stores, and I ended up working for Selfridges, in the spa on the fifth floor, for my first job, which was really good experience. Because it was a tourist, obviously a lot of the tourists used to come to us. We used to do a lot of massages, body treatments, more the relaxing side because they were obviously on holiday coming for a treatment. A lot of American ladies used to come over and go shopping downstairs and the come up and have all their treatments, so you meet like loads of different people, so it was good.

00:02:32 I do have a role in the salons of all my new starters, or if we bring in a new product, I would be the one that would sort of do some basic training in the salon. And since I’ve started to take that on and do a lot more training, in the next couple of years I would like to do my teacher training course so I could do teaching as well with the college, so that’s something I’m going to look into in the next year or so because it’s a course you can do while you’re working as well.

00:03:03 I go to the gym, obviously, because I work I a gym so I would train quite a lot. My boyfriend is a golf professional, so he would be into working out and things like that, so we’ve got a dog so we take the dog out where we live in Hertfordshire, a lot of my friends are in the same industry, so I see a lot of my friends through work and that, and outside as well.

00:03:25 My mum obviously enjoys what I do because she gets treatments. She has to wait until last but she gets her treatments done, so she finds it interesting because my mum’s been a secretary all her life, so she finds it interesting that I do something completely different, and my dad, yes, he thinks it’s good because I enjoy what I do, so, yes, he’s pleased that I enjoy it.

00:03:50 End