"The Beauty of Knowledge" with Rebecca Cullen, M&S Beauty Brands & Education Manager 
On Friday 26th January, CEW welcomed M&S Beauty Brands & Education Manager, Rebecca Cullen to speak to a sold out audience about her inspiring career and ‘The Beauty of Knowledge’. Rebecca received the 2017 ‘CEW Members Achiever Award’ in November last year, paying testament to the respect she receives from her peers as well as acknowledging her incredibly successful career in the beauty industry.
Rebecca began her discussion by considering the deep-rooted passion she has for the world of beauty that began at a very young age. Rebecca launched her career working across a broad range of roles for a variety of different companies. In doing so, Rebecca developed an incredibly varied skill set and had an in-depth knowledge across a range of beauty-related fields. With much determination and by using her impressive career history, Rebecca worked her way into the beauty sector for M&S where she would help to set up beauty departments as well as train beauty advisors on how to apply make-up and deal with customers.
Within her current role at M&S Rebecca is responsible for educating and training beauty advisors, as well as encouraging them to keep up to date with product knowledge so that they provide an exceptional service to all customers. Throughout Rebecca’s discussion of both her personal success and also the success of M&S Beauty, there were three reoccurring themes that worked as the driving force behind each achievement: passion, education and communication.
With the ever changing face of the beauty industry it can be hard for retailers and beauty advisors to keep up with the required knowledge to provide an exceptional service. With this in mind, and using years of experience working across the industry, Rebecca and her team worked endlessly to create and maintain a robust and unbiased education model to work across the M&S Beauty division. The model involves a range of platforms designed for the M&S Beauty team to ensure they remain educated and passionate about what they do. The teams undertake training courses and have access to a selection of written material, as well as using an interactive network support forum to encourage communication and education between all members of the Beauty team.
Overall, it is through these various platforms that M&S Beauty Advisors are able to constantly build on their education and in turn provide a professional and passionate service to all M&S customers. Rebecca “cannot stress enough the importance of the why”, referring to the basic skills and knowledge that an individual must have in order to move forward within a given industry. Rebecca provided the audience with an inspirational insight into the inner workings of the M&S Beauty team, and encouraged others to never underestimate the power of passion, education and communication when it comes to building a career.
 Hosted by