John Butterworth

This passage is a synopsis of my academic and professional experience and my personal qualities, a fullstanding version can be read in my resume and application letter. I have an MA in Sociology European Societies, which I completed whilst working 3 days a week in the E-travel and Hospitality industry in Berlin. I am also an experienced desk based account manager, a data analyst and a complaints administrator. I possess a combination of business acumen, analytical skill and administrative qualities such as working to deadlines and keeping documents well ordered. I have gathered experience of using SPSS (syntax) professionally, a working knowledge of XML, academic use of R Studio and I have completed a course in SQL. I am fluent in both English and German and I am a bit of a perfectionist with  a diplomatic nature and an eye for detail. I hope this helps you to learn a little more about me and I look forward to discussing my application further with you and how I intend to fuse my experiences and learning to develop my career.

To explain my work experience I will begin with my most recent jobs. I have been working for Booking.com as an Accommodation Service Executive II for 10 years in Berlin. During this time I have worked with business partners in the accommodation rentals industry assisting them with their content, rates and availability and also with commercial advice to improve sales. A second job within this role was acquiring new business by following up registration requests and helping new partners set up their accommodation on the website.

In 2022 I branched out into the market research industry in Berlin, working six months as a freelance research interviewer at cultural tourist attractions day and night and then as a data manager, both with a local Berlin firm called Info GmbH Markt und Meinungsforschung. I continued to work at Booking.com on weekends during this time where I was given the opportunity by Info GmbH to grow my analytical skills preparing and cleansing data with SPSS and Excel for analysis. Prior to my work in Berlin, whilst learning German in Göttingen in 2012 I worked as a research assistant for the Courant Research Centre under Professor Xiaoua Yu at the Georg August University Göttingen.

Before I began my bachelor studies in Bristol UK in 2009 I worked as a Complaints Administrator for the NHS, where I took complaints regarding patients stays in the local hospital, then forwarded the relevant parts to corresponding departments, set timeframes for responses then recollected and formatted the relevant parts into single reply letters to be signed by the CEO. This job lasted for about 6 months leading up to my studies. Before this I was employed as a desk based account manager in the telecommunications industry in 2 different directorates, the most recent being for Managed Accounts Through Partnership at ADP in Bristol, where I owned the relationship between British Telecom (BT) and 250 small medium enterprises. I received a case study for my outstanding acheivement in this role which I still have. Before this I did a similar role for BT Retail Major Business where I had a single blue chip customer: IBM, I worked in BT Major Business for about a year and a half.

For my Master thesis I wrote a dissertation on  personel management called ‘Changing people’s minds through a channel to the heart', it used the perspective of the sociology of emotions to review literature on the subject. One of the most important lessons I learnt during my studies was how to handle, format and analyse data sets. This was achieved through the use of Microsoft Excel and R Studio, it was also my first experience of using programming language to format data and analyse variables. The methods of research and analysis were accompanied by theoretical knowledge into the flow of people through Europe and the way business is conducted in the European Area. This was a bi-lingual masters degree studied completely in Berlin, it combined the social sciences with political science with a particularly quantitative focus on Europe.

My bachelors degree was composed of a combination of sociology and criminology. I won the Vathek dissertation prize for my final project entitled 'Fear and Fighting in the Night Time Economy: Meta-ethnographic research into the strong association between violent crime and alcohol consumption in night time settings'.  During the course of my studies I learnt important primary and secondary research techniques like interviewing and meta-synthesis. I had my first experience of quantitative data analysis using SPSS as part of the syllabus.