Experience

Friends Meeting House Manchester Conference Centre in the heart of the city centre

• Venue Supervisor

  • Apr 2013 - Present

  This unique venue offers a range of 14 meeting rooms and conferencing facilities for hire in central Manchester; from an intimate space for a city centre meeting, to a conference facility in a hall that can seat 300 people.This is a leadership role, where I report directly to the CEO. This concerns the management of the meeting rooms, whilst overseeing 2 hospitality team members to ensure the care of up to 600 room users, their safety and wellbeing whilst using the venue.I oversee the organised management of meetings for charities, businesses, social and support groups. This requires a great deal of collaboration and communication to manage, what can sometimes be challenging relationships, due to the contradictory nature of business types who use and/or own the space. It’s in my remit to ensure venue users comply to contractual usage set by the venue owners. I orchestrate a lot of collaboration across teams, mainly those in Bookings, to establish efficient and accurate venue management, from customer liaison to maintenance and process management. An essential part of my job is also to implement safety and security processes and ensure that they are adhered to by both venue users and the team.I’ve coordinated several successful projects whilst here; one example being the establishment of a refined notification system for room users to support the customer experience. As Duty Manager, I created an Excel macro to format daily noticeboards, informing room users of meeting room locations. To do this effectively, I assessed our existing system to identify risks and create improvements; identified process points that could be automated; built a macro within Excel to enable imported data to be reorganised and formatted; added functionality to main tab to start the macro and a separate function to clear data when noticeboard completed. This was successful in producing consistently accurate noticeboards, saving at least 3 working hours per month.



Waterstones

• United Kingdom
• Retail
• 700 & Above Employee

• Bookseller

  • Dec 2013 - Jan 2014

  Great experience working as a Christmas temp. Spent most of my earnings on books taking advantage of their generous staff discount. It was also a great research opportunity. I worked as a bookseller which involves all shop floor duties. Great experience working as a Christmas temp. Spent most of my earnings on books taking advantage of their generous staff discount. It was also a great research opportunity. I worked as a bookseller which involves all shop floor duties.



UNIAC

• Belgium
• Accounting
• 1 - 100 Employee

• IT Manager / IT Support Technician

  • Jun 2008 - Oct 2012

  UNIAC is a Universities internal audit consortium providing audit services to 11 universities including Manchester University, Manchester Metropolitan University and University of London. I was promoted from Technician to IT manager, responsible with providing technical support and administration, overseeing all aspects of IT provision for the organisations’ audit department.Through direct management, I serviced, updated and maintained server and virtualised server environment, switches, firewalls, storage and other networking equipment, desktops, laptops, mobile phones, fixed line telephony and even maintained the office copier!I managed the procurement of new equipment, tracking warranty information, overseeing all licences, leading on any related projects. For example, when the departments laptops were approaching end of warranty, I led the investigation into options for hardware upgrades by liaising with the Lead Director to determine laptop requirements and conducted research, shortlisted 3 for testing, developed set-up tests and negotiated on pricing; moved the system from manual to automatic process, allowing OS image deployment across 20 laptops simultaneously. Successfully reduced time for the deployment from 2 weeks to 2 days, increasing productivity by 100%.My role demanded continuous liaison to manage expectations versus functionality; analysing current tech and investigating future technologies to strategise upgrade plans. I led the maintenance and monitoring of the VPN connection for multiple remote workers, ran daily maintenance checks, ensured backups had worked and been stored correctly, monitored anti-virus alerts on laptops or servers; and ultimately managed the continuity of IT services even during a complete premises relocation to ensure uninterrupted access to the physical networking infrastructure.



Tesco

• Jordan
• Business Supplies & Equipment
• 700 & Above Employee

• Tesco Fresh Food Team Leader

  • Dec 2003 - Jun 2008

  This was my first tenure in a leadership role; in one of the largest supermarket chains in the UK, I managed a team of 20 in the fresh food department in the Extra Store and 14 at the Metro Store. This required a great deal of communication and understanding as the team were very diverse, mainly part-time, with varying levels of skills and experience.My analytical nature was a real support here, when tasked with reducing store waste levels. Through effectively liaising with stock control, developing my own knowledge of customer buying trends and being creative in the use of POS, my stores consistently hit waste targets, reaching no.1 store for waste optimisation.I looked after all staff related administration including rotas and holidays, assisting with employee reviews and delivering staff training across various compliance models including Health and Safety and Food Hygiene. I was recommended for the options management training programme; a comprehensive mentoring and coaching course that focused on the development of leadership skills.