Hannah

Finance

BEng (Hons) Civil Engineering, University of Birmingham
Joined Tesco August 2003

My expectations of the Finance graduate scheme were that Tesco like many other companies would support you through the CIMA qualification, and that’s the Chartered Institute of Management Accountancy. Tesco provide you a number of study days and what’s really good is that your line manager supports you to make sure you get that time off and plan your work around that.

The Tesco scheme gives you great variety to move around the business. And, as Finance is a support function, we get to support all the different business areas. I’ve worked in property, retail, distribution and I’m now working in central and would really love to go and work in commercial. We’ve also got new businesses being set up such as the Direct business, we’ve got the Dot.com online shopping - so there’s great variety.

Finance is very much integrated into the business, so you tend to find that most finance functions sit within the operational side of the business. I think we’re seen as business partners, so the business really asks our opinion and then we help them make their decisions. We provide information or steering them with different options - so we provide the pros and cons to each argument. We even perhaps help them strategically as well.

The training and development I’ve received since joining has been fantastic. As soon as I joined the graduate programme I had a three year training plan that involved influencing courses and understanding how we could become people managers when the time arose. We also did things on time management and presenting. Another aspect that has been fantastic is that all our line managers are trained to support with Personal Development Plans, so every one of us is given feedback regularly and you get to develop yourself and understand where your strengths and weaknesses lie; allowing for your Personal Development Plan to be tailored to address those.