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This Week We Feature Young Professional Michelle N. James
This week’s Young Professional happens to be a success story that did not travel the storied route of campus hallways and fraternity groups but has instead climbed the gruelling rungs of achievement in life through a not altogether uncommon, yet often unheralded approach.
Virgin Islands News Online is proud to present our Young Professional for this week, Michelle N. James, a Virgin Islander and current Assistant Manager at the Nanny Cay Marina.
Michelle revealed that while growing up, she looked up to the internationally renowned media mogul, Oprah Winfrey as a role model and at one time aspired to make a career out of becoming a computer engineer. She was also in the Brownies while growing up.
Born and raised in Purcell Estate, Michelle attended the Althea Scatliffe Primary School before moving on to the then BVI High School. Our Young Professional related that she dropped out of High School; but never allowed this to get in the way of her studies as she later completed her High School studies through the Alternative Secondary Programme being offered at the Elmore Stoutt High School. Some of her hobbies she explained included meeting people, listening to music and dancing.
According to our Young Professional, her love of meeting new faces and generally being a people person led her to her first vocation as a waitress at Skyworld where she worked for a short time before eventually moving on.
Her next move saw her heading to the Nanny Cay Marina after she decided that she had preferred to have a more challenging role as her choice of occupation. Michelle started out as a Receptionist at her new job and over a period of 18 years, worked her way steadily through the ranks to become a Supervisor and Assistant manager at the Marina. She described her experience over the years as challenging but explained that her love of meeting new persons and making persons comfortable in the customer service industry kept her going over the years. “I looked for things that were challenging and I started to excel,” she disclosed. She has now been the Assistant Manager for three years at the Nanny Cay Marina.
Michelle further explained that as a manager, she was keen on giving persons an opportunity to prove themselves in what she described as the “customer service/boating industry”. Her day to day role sees her preparing schedules for staff “366 days” of the year. She is also in charge of preparing invoices for boats and the ordering of fuel among other things at the company. The single mom of four loves meeting persons of different cultures and remains motivated in her job by the wonderful people that she meets during her day to day rounds. One of her weaknesses, she explained, was the social networking phenomenon of Facebook.
She is also an avid church-goer and said her faith played a crucial role in keeping her motivated as well.
Her advice to young persons is that there is no set limit on when or where in life someone can go to pursue their dreams or desires.
Our young professional still has plans to achieve major goals in her life such as going to college to get a degree and go even further in life than she is right now. “It’s on my dream list,” she said, “but for now my main target in life is my kids… making sure that they get to that place they need to be, meaning that they finish school, go to college and get whatever degrees that they need.”
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