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Job title: Business development manager

For: Phone Plus


Mark Checksfield's new job looks much like the one he's just left. But that's about all that's looking familiar.

Checksfield, his wife and two children are recent arrivals to the North Shore in Auckland from England, where they lived in Guildford, Surrey.

Although Checksfield "made a few stabs" at the New Zealand employment scene from Britain, his search began in earnest once he arrived here on August 16. "My appointment [at Phone Plus] is about making a small call centre company a bigger one and a much more competitive one," he says. "Outsourcing is where we're trying to make our mark."

In his last post, staff "forged a call centre of about nine or 10 staff over the last three years into a major player in the UK with 120 operators doing all kinds of things from Government services and tourism as well as in-bound and out-bound call handling".

Checksfield, 38, brings a global perspective to his new homeland: fluent in English and German thanks to a Swiss childhood, he is married to a German.

He completed a degree in international relations and thought he might be a teacher, but then he got into computers and took a masters degree in information systems.