I’ve been a confirmed delivery driver for Chronopost France since 2007, after a few months as sorter.

I like when there’s move, and being in constant contact with our customers. I like the autonomy and the feeling of freedom that my job offers me.

Customer contact is different as customer usually likes to be delivered by a woman, which remains like an exception nowadays. In some cases, customer doesn’t hesitate to help me spontaneously. I also feel like mutual trust, which is not necessarily the case for some of my male colleagues. And maybe a woman has a greater ability to keep calm in a tense moment.

Women are still rare in this business, I know very little. I think women have very interesting characteristics for this kind of job, but they are hindered by handling and the physical requirement it implies.

I do not feel any difference in treatment, negative or positive, between men and women in my depot.

I would tell her not to hesitate, that she has her place, especially if she likes movement and customer contact.

I have been working in Chronopost Portugal for 10 years, integrated in the B2C Pickup department, managing a network of parcel delivery shops with about 550 stores distributed throughout the country. In this sector, Chronopost Portugal is, at a national level, the most required and preferred by all the Portuguese, having recently won for the 3^rd consecutive time the “5 Stars Award” (the most preferred prize voted by the consumers) for its Pickup network.

I feel motivated to be part of a company that is surely a reference and value for the national consumer. My function allows me to contact and get to know a great diversity of people and places during the recruitment of new stores or partners, and later in the daily follow-up. One of the main factors that stimulates me every day is that I feel useful and predisposed to help our partners, thus creating closer links and contributing to the growth of the company in the surrounding society.

Women’s strength in emotional intelligence can be an advantage. Emotional intelligence is the ability to perceive and understand both our own emotions and the emotions of others, team members, customers, etc. According to experts, women have strong communication and networking skills, that can encourage teamwork, and they are customer-oriented to provide the best services to their clients.

Women today no longer consider a carrier as a single job for the "man". There are more and more women in companies in this business sector, in various departments, and even performing as drivers. As an example, in my department we are mostly women! I believe that this feminisation has contributed to a significant improvement in the quality and competence of our service nowadays.

Although we are part of a Group, where the majority of employees are men, there is already a significant number of women in various departments of the company. There are not many women still holding positions of leadership, but I think that in the coming years this reality will change.

The key is to be yourself, showing your skills, willing to learn. But also to be ambitious, committed, interested and competent in everything you do. We women, and when we have ambition, are and will always be better at whatever function or activity we perform.

I started working for DPD Ireland in June 2017 and I work for the International Department. My main role is tracing items which are unaccounted for, but I also handle general customer service enquiries and international queries.

I enjoy working with lots of different people and corresponding with people from different places. It is very interesting and diverse on a daily basis, investigating consignments from all over the world. It gives you real insight into other people’s lives, whether it's a whole school waiting to receive tickets to an important event, or a small business owner depending on us, so he can provide a good service to his customers.

I would say that half of my calls and correspondence during a typical day is internal communication. Working in the international department, almost every query I handle, I have to rely on information from lots of different sources within the Group, our local depots, and other branches of the Group in the UK and Europe. It gives you a sense of a real team effort and all of the work we do is based on the ease of communication and efficient relaying of information across the whole Group.

I don’t think there are specific advantages to being a women in my job, but I do appreciate that women in my team are very good at helping the team work more efficiently as a whole. They are always focused on making the task at hand more and more efficient, organising better ways to do things to benefit everybody, communicating effectively, distributing the work fairly, never shirking responsibility, and even taking on more tasks to facilitate others, so everything can run more cohesively in future. If I had to generalise, I think they place a high value on a sustained consolidated effort being better for everyone in the long term.

Positive, even if in my department there are more women in managerial roles than men.

Go for it! There are wonderful opportunities in all different fields, I would not hesitate to recommend this type of work to friends.

I think the whole experience will be an amazing adventure, even just to get to the selection phase in France is fantastic.

I love to travel and meet new people and I think there is no better way to get to know someone then when embracing a new challenge, especially in the outdoors. I hope I can be resourceful, learn new skills, apply myself, have fun and have something positive to offer the group.

I know that just being part of the selections and getting to know the other candidates will be a brilliant experience and that even if I don’t get through, I will be able to enjoy the excitement when the Belem sails from Dublin in June!