Steve
Video transcript
My name’s Steve Jermyn and I’m a department manager at Waitrose in Buckhurst Hill. I was studying a management science degree at Loughborough University, which incorporated a lot of modules on marketing and general business. I started in branch and got to know all departments within the branch. It took three weeks to go round, visit the different sections and understand what they did. The next six weeks were then spent putting some detail and some meat on the bones of what’s done in the day-to-day life of a branch.
I then became an Assistant Section Manager, which is part of the management team and helps you start understanding the bits that are vital for development in the scheme: the leadership aspects, the coaching and mainly the organisation that really needs to be part of everyday life. Once I’d finished being an Assistant Section Manager in one branch I then undertook a change of branch. Then for the last two months of my placement year I then got the opportunity to work with section managers to help develop the business and really govern the way that branch was led.
I tell my friends and peers about my placement and say that it’s not something that I recommend to everybody. It’s very broad, you need a lot of different skills, so if you want to specialise in one area whether it be finance, marketing, personnel, it’s not specifically for you. But what it does do is challenge you over a very broad spectrum of things. You have to be really hands on and be part of that leadership within your branch. If that doesn’t appeal to you, I can’t recommend it to you. But it’s a good challenge for those who want to be involved and love team work and leadership.
I guess the major thing that the industrial placement scheme gave to me was the necessity for organisation. I guess you could call me a stereotypical student in my first and second years that I perhaps wasn’t very well organised, maybe spent too much time socialising and not enough time burying my head in the books. So what that gave me when came back to university was an appreciation of the skills that I needed if I was going to successfully make that transition from university life into real life.
I applied for the placement at Waitrose because we had an opportunity to meet with some of the Partners from Waitrose who came to visit Loughborough on a Wednesday afternoon. This gave me an opportunity to get to know the business a little bit more and for them to get to know me. So I got to know what the business was going to look like before I entered, got comfortable with it and decided it was something that I wanted to do.
Why did I accept the position? Because it was everything that suited, for me it was what I wanted from my industrial placement year. It was what I wanted to gain and by the end of it I could see the results I was going to get. At the end of my industrial placement year I was lucky enough to be offered a place on the graduate scheme.
What brought me back was that I knew I wasn’t going to be walking back into exactly the same things day after day. I knew I was going to be walking into new challenges and new opportunities to develop myself. I knew that in another 12 months I’d have an even broader set of skills, and that I’d have even more that I could showcase to the business and the opportunity to move upwards. And for me that was an opportunity too good to pass up.
