Homegrown talent encouraged

Jessica Keiller is now manager of Torpedo7 in Westgate. Photo / Ted Baghurst

Not everyone has their career mapped out when they leave school. And nor do all school leavers have qualifications. Many, however, work their way up from the very bottom in their industry and succeed. For them, no job is a bad job.

When Jessica Keiller found herself in need of a job age 21, she printed out her CV and walked the length of Cameron St in Whangarei handing it out. Quite literally any job would do and she was delighted when she landed work at the Noel Leeming store as a sales consultant. Little did Keiller know that within five years she would be at the helm of a store in sister company Torpedo7, managing 33 staff members.

Looking back to her school years, Keiller could never have pictured herself in a career. "In high school I wasn't a perfect student at all. At school they tell you success only comes from going to uni."

Keiller's ambition started to emerge a very short while into her time at Noel Leeming. "I spent a few months floating about, then I realised if I was going to stay there I might as well make the most out of it and be the best I could be," says Keiller. That included showing initiative, which was soon spotted by the store manager.

Keiller had her own area of the store to look after but could see other jobs that needed doing and would step up without being asked. Initiative is something she now values and appreciates in her own staff .

When a vacancy in the Whangarei store for a 3IC (third in charge) arose, her manager knew Keiller was the woman for the job and offered the youngster her first break. "That gave me more confidence to think 'maybe I can make something out of this'," she says.

Subsequently, when the assistant manager's role came up she applied and was appointed to the job. She felt that both her manager and the company had her back.

Keiller was nominated by her manager for Noel Leeming development programmes including the Assistant Manager Development Programme, Aspire Women in Leadership course, and then the Store Manger Development Programme.

Keiller secured her first store manager role at Noel Leeming St Lukes at the age of 25 and then six months later was shoulder-tapped to take on a store manager role at the larger Torpedo7 store in Auckland's Westgate.

Thanks to the support she has received from The Warehouse Group, which owns Noel Leeming and Torpedo7, Keiller can now imagine herself moving into even more senior roles such as regional manager, general manager or chief executive. "I am pretty ambitious [and] that would be on my radar. Nothing is impossible. [But] I am realistic about how the world works.

Melissa Pearce was just looking for part-time work when she answered a job ad for cleaning. Like Keiller she never imagined the job would lead her into management. Yet 15 years later she is an operations manager for a regional branch of OCS Group NZ.

Pearce, then 30, had just given birth to the third of her four children. She started cleaning four hours a day through OCS at a local school.

The job was meant to be a backstop until Pearce could fulfil her dream of opening a cafe. "Cleaning was not a career in my mind, it was a part-time job. One day I wanted a cafe business." Nonetheless Pearce soon started asking her supervisor about how she could move onwards and upwards. "That was always in the back of my mind," she says.

Her supervisor at OCS listened and before long Pearce was offered a cleaning supervisor role at the local Woolworths supermarket (now Countdown). There she organised and managed the other staff members and cleaned as well. "I thoroughly enjoyed that," she says. The role was still part-time.

From there Pearce stepped up to an eight-hour-a-day supervisor's role for a contract at the former Land Transport Safety Authority (LTSA) in Palmerston North.

Pearce made friends with staff at the LTSA cafe, leaving OCS. Just months later she was head hunted to return to OCS as a contract supervisor, in charge of about 50 contracts.

"It was a very challenging job," she says. "Among other things you become a counsellor. It was also very rewarding being able to build up relationships with the clients."

Pearce, now 43, was subsequently promoted to operations manager for the Palmerston North/Manawatu region of OCS.

Despite starting work with no formal qualifications, she now manages three supervisors and a contracts manager who are ultimately in charge of some 200 staff. All the training/qualifications she needed to move up from part-time cleaner to a manager were done on the job with the support of her own manager, Paul James.

Pearce says the cafe dream is now history. OCS has become her second family and although extremely happy in her current role, she can see other avenues in the company that she may want to pursue in the future.

Moving from frontline cleaner or security guard to manager isn't unusual at OCS, says general manager HR Maria Steel. Managers and HR staff are always on the lookout for employees who put their hand up, have the ability to do the job, show ambition/motivation and display behaviours and values that match those of the company. That "is talent", says Steel. "Winner, winner, chicken dinner."

Good supervisors and managers identify these people who can then be given opportunities to step up. That may be in a more senior role, in a secondment, or an acting role.

The company develops its home-grown talent in a variety of ways.

About 70 per cent of the learning for the new role will take place on the job, says Steel. They will have monthly coaching meetings with their manager or mentor where gaps in their knowledge or experience are identified and plugged and the employee nurtured.

"Importantly, OCS empowers people to make mistakes and provide a safety net for those mistakes," says Steel.