"Throughout my time with Tesco, I have been fully supported with planning my future career."
John
Supply
Chain
Programme
For me, it's only when I started doing the job, I realised what the job entails. It's so vast, you meet people on a day-to-day basis that you'd never meet if you hadn't taken on this role. For me, because we're ensuring the quality and safety of products and that they can legally come on sale in the UK, there's a lot of responsibility we have ethically. Because Tesco is a growing business - with any kind of growing business you're going to get some negativity - but I think the thing that surprised me most about the company was their commitment to the corporate social responsibility.
Coming into Tesco I've worked on product design so I've seen the product from conceptualisation stage to realisation stage to manufacture and seeing it on the shop shelf. So essentially for me it was actually seeing it from the commercial side because a lot of the product I was working on was industrial based - products that essentially would never be sold commercially. So at Tesco the products have the intention of being sold on the shop floor. So you work with the Buyer. Buyer has the concept idea and then you work with them. Essentially you risk assess the product from the outset. You know if it's not going to work or whether there's going to be too much legislation for it to pass through. Sometimes products blatantly scream this is too much of a high risk product - it's not going to sell.
I think really my career is going to be upwards and onwards. I think for me, because the programme is quite fast-tracked it makes you want an appetite to do more. Tesco promotes career progression - just recently there have been people on my team that have been promoted and moved on to various other teams through talent planning. So the opportunities really are true and I think you're only really limited by yourself.