Tom Dumble

I spent the majority of my childhood climbing and over a decade of competing at a national level. Having spent a lot of time in Durham climbing centre, I was offered a job as a volunteer on the back of making good relationships with the staff and members. I spent 6 weeks volunteering as an assistance for the children's summer camps scheme before accepting a permanent part-time role in the autumn. Over the next year and a half I became adept in most of the roles and duties involved in the gym, including: reception work, greeting customers, managing sessions, delivering hot and cold food and drink. I managed and quickly mastered the reception software known as Rock Gym Pro which involved corresponding with developers is America as we were faced with the challenge of operating a climbing centre with COVID and social distancing restrictions. I was able to use the software to create a booking system with staggered drop in sessions that allowed us to clean the facility between visitors, and also allowed customers to book sessions using the accompanying mobile app which I helped to implement. I also worked as a climbing instructor, mainly for ages 8-16 but also for our youth academy, the members of which would go to compete at national level.

After the centre was shut down for a third time due to covid, I decided to leave the role as the line between a job and a hobby began to blur. I spent the summer away from employment to focus on climbing as a passion.

I secured this role in September after an enjoyable summer but realised I had to start work again, this was seen as an interim option while I was looking for a more secure role in the business / IT sector. I did build on my experience of customer service and discovered a desire for organisation and efficiency as I spent a lot of time in the warehouse working with stock and manifests.

My first introduction to office work was working for Atos, at this time I was working through the agency Addecco. My role consisted of processing PIP benefits at the triage stage, this involved having to process high volumes of work very quickly, this position again stimulated my need for finding flaws in a process and figuring out a way to make it more efficient, as a result, my work output was very high.

In November, I was given a permanent place in the role of business admin. This change came with extra responsibilities that I had requested, there were several other tasks in the work queue that I was trained including paying GP invoices for medical evidence, dealing with change requests to referrals from claimants or the DWP and managing mailboxes for ad-hoc requests and queries. I also took on the role of quality assurance admin,

I was responsible for building spreadsheets for our work to be checked. I used PowerBI to run reports on work completed and impartially selected cases for QA, all QA checks were tracked using a monthly spreadsheet. I was interested to make sure that the work we completed was done as accurate as possible as I was aware the impact it could have on the claimant.

This subsequently led to me becoming a trainer for some of the tasks on the team, introducing new starters to our work. On a couple of occasions I conducted induction days to new starters. Using resources provided to me I would give joiners a friendly introduction to the business and what their role would be.

Additionally, I took on the role of IT Liaison officer for my team, I have always have been interested in IT and have a good level of knowledge with computers. The role involved helping those on the team with any IT issues they experienced, raising tickets with the various service desks we had and making sure the team had correct accesses and equipment. This became more challenging when more people started working hybrid but I knew it was important to have good communication links with the team should they need to reach me. I enjoyed this responsibility and I will always try to help out a colleague when I can.

As a part of this role, I became the IT admin for system we used called ActiveOps Workware. This was a product ATOS used as a real time management software for use of the staff, it was used to record clock in and clock out times and recording work outputs. My job as the admin was to make sure all the staff were on the right team and they had the correct FTE, if they had a change in contract. Running timing exercises so each task/duty had a time assigned to it, this would be used to calculate staff's productivity.

In early 2024 I was offered a secondment to the business operations management team. With the contract being handed over to a new provider, Atos wanted to ensure their headcount data was managed properly to make sure of a seamless transition. I had previously made connections with the team due to my work on the ActiveOps System, they would notify my of any joiners, movers or leavers and I would make the changes on the system. The BOM role initially consisted of managing the recruitment tracker, a spreadsheet that kept a record of all the staff that were employed on the IAS contract, their organisational position, line manager, FTE and other employment info. This would be the spreadsheet ATOS would use as data for the TUPE transfer to the new providers, so it was crucial the data was accurate.

Additionally to the recruitment tracker, I was quickly trained on the rest of the duties that dealt with recruitment management (known as the 'changes' duty), this included: processing requests from managers for leavers and team changes and making sure all of the relevant departments were informed; processing new starters through our supply chain and recruitment partners, checking CVs, adding them to the HR org chart, requesting their correct IT accesses and arranging delivery of equipment; dealing with changes to contract terms and and working hours. At the end of the month I had to ensure all line manager changes had been fully processed before the HR window closed, managers would often wait until the end of the month before submitting their change requests, so there was a lot of pressure on the team to make all the correct changes before the deadline.

We were a small team who worked on a rota, it mainly involved rotating who was working on the recruitment tracker and who was working on changes and who was on the recruitment tracker, we dealt with a very high volume on changes and all of it had to be recorded on the recruitment tracker, so a good level of communication was important to have, which we did.

I relished working on BOM as it was such a fast paced and high-pressure environment, constantly having to meet deadlines and a vast variety of duties to complete over the course of the day.

I returned to working as a business administrator after my secondment had ended, I had to take on several duties after the transition mainly to do with system issues and process design. I spent much of the opening weeks in Maximus speaking to various IT departments trying to fix system and access problems with the team, even visiting home workers to resolve issues with their workstations. I also created some processes to do with reconciliation of work and creating a timesheet using excel that tracked clock in and out times and work outputs/productivity of staff. I've also developed a good relationship with our finance team, part of the team duty is paying invoices for GP reports and customer expenses, this means we have to reconcile and confirm all payments with finance, I also have completed audits with the DWP where they required evidence for certain payments. As a result, I've gained a good knowledge of of finance and ledger systems.