Angela

Senior Marketing Manager, Tesco.com

BSc Computer Science, Exeter University
Joined Tesco September 2000

When I joined Tesco.com in 2000, it was a start up company but with the backing of a £multimillion business. That was the real attraction for me. The scheme lasted a year and within that year, I learnt a lot about how the business works, from operations to IT to marketing. I also learnt a lot about how to manage my time effectively – after eight years of practising I think I’m almost there!

As part of the scheme I was assigned a mentor who was a member of the Tesco.com leadership team at the time – he provided a lot of support and guidance. And when the scheme finished, I continued meeting with him until he left a few years ago.  This was a great support to have as it allowed me to confidentially ask for advice when I needed it - as this was my first job after Uni, I didn't really know what the talent planning process was or how I should go about getting sponsorship from my colleagues so it was great to be able to ask someone for that help.

At the moment, I lead the Web Development team, responsible for the customer facing development plan for both online grocery and wine sites.  On a day to day basis, I manage a team of five and spend a lot of my time working with our insight team to understand how customers use our website so that I can then begin to define the future customer requirements/enhancements for the websites.  I also spend a lot of time working with our IT teams creating our development / release plans and working very closely with the project team when we get to the implementation stage to ensure that everything that is implemented matches the requirements spec and our customer needs.

I think the talent planning scheme at Tesco is fantastic. It gives you a real idea of what your options are, where your career is heading and allows you to collect quality feedback. It’s enabled me to try five very different roles in eight years. I’ve had to learn a completely different skill set every time but I now know what my strengths and weaknesses are and therefore can begin to channel my career to where I want to be in five or 10 years’ time.