Professional Work Experience
In the Summer of 2026, I completed my Professional Work Experience. During this time I worked at Nordstrom at Oak Park Mall in Overland Park, Kansas.
This summer, I worked at Nordstrom at Oak Park Mall, and I was hired for men’s accessories, suiting, and shoes. Depending on what time of shift I worked. For opening, I had to make sure that all the sections that I was responsible for were in good order and looked presentable for the customers. For middle day shift, I had to help with efficiency and make sure everything was in order during my time that I was there, as well as maintain my sections. And if I was a closer, I had to make sure all the sections were in order and everything was put away so that the opening process for the employees next morning was as streamlined as possible.
The POS system that we used was extremely advanced, and worked hand-in-hand with the store website nordstrom.com. This made it extremely easy for us to do everything that we can for our customers to make sure that we get them exactly what they need in a timely and efficient manner.
Customer service is the most important thing at a store like Nordstrom as they pride themselves on being able to accommodate any and every question concern and idea that a customer may have. Taking time and making sure that a customer gets exactly what they want the first time is extremely important and a bare minimum standard that the company holds their employees to. Learning this bare minimum standard has taught me a lot about what customer service really means. It has shown me that above all else getting it right is important and doing anything that you can remedy any situation that may arise is what contributes to a professional and efficient business.
Organization and process is extremely important and has taught me what it means to have efficiency at your forefront to help not only yourself but the customers that you serve. In Nordstrom our back rooms are extremely efficient and very, very well organized and checked very regularly to make sure that we have adequate stock. and we know where everything is so if a customer were to request something that we do everything that we can to make sure we either have it in store or we can stay with confidence that we don’t.
I’ve learned that retail can be a very stressful business, high volume and complex requests are no stranger to an every day process of a store like Nordstrom as they’ve built themselves on a reputation of efficiency and quality, and that is a standard that I’ve learned what it takes to maintain that reputation.
One of the big projects of this summer was setting up for the Nordstrom anniversary sale. This is the biggest sale of the year for the company and on top of that this year they were celebrating Nordstrom 125, the 125th anniversary of the company. This entailed a lot of new merchandise coming into the store and needing to be set up and also rearranging the existing inventory in order to accommodate the new anniversary items we had coming in. We worked very diligently with our visual merchandising team to re-organize the sales floor, we then marked which racks and displays were going to be used for anniversary. Finally, we had set up and marked all of our displays with the correct tags signage and color coordinated markers so it was cleared to the customers which items were on anniversary.
Working here has been a eye-opening experience, and as I have explained, it has taught me a lot about the true meaning of customer service. From a company that has had over a century of time to figure out what that truly means. From the near obsessive dedication to getting things right or remedy an issue with a transaction, I was taught about unwavering confidence in being able to handle anything that a customer might ask. I was also taught about organization processes and all the behind-the-scenes little things that it takes to manage just one department in a store that is well known for its efficiency and industry leading customer focused services. Also getting hands-on experience in high volume stressful environments, while maintaining the expected level of customer service that I was encompassed with his top me a lot about how to streamline processes to serve everybody the best I can while maintaining efficiency.