Before starting with Dick Lovett, I used to work for McDonalds as an Assistant Store Manager but wanted to pursue a career in IT. I had applied for several entry positions at other companies before seeing the 1st Line IT Support position that Dick Lovett was offering. I jumped at the opportunity to apply and combine my passion for cars and IT and to work for a well-known company locally. At the time I didn’t have any experience with working in IT, but I had a passion for the career path and had been studying an IT qualification in my own time all of which I think helped me to secure the job.
During my first year with Dick Lovett, the company were undergoing a period of expansion and refurbishment with MINI Swindon moving to a new dealership, the Purchase of BMW and MINI Bath, a new Aston Martin Dealership, and a Head Office move all of which made for an exciting and busy first year and really helped me to get a grounding for the business. My Role as a 1st Line Support involved being the first point of contact for all enquires that came into the IT Service Desk and involved anything from password resets to setting up computers.
My current role involves working as part of the infrastructure team to manage, design and implement new technologies whilst maintaining existing systems and hardware such as Phone System, Switches, Servers, Office 365, and Azure Cloud Services. Essentially this means I help to look after a lot of the bits behind the scenes that help our staff to do their day-to-day work.
My favourite part of the job is the variety. One week we could be setting up a brand-new state of the art dealership, the next we could be implementing a new technology. No week is ever the same and it always keeps things interesting.
Dick Lovett have always been supportive of my ambitions to continually develop, and I’ve been lucky enough to continue to progress through the roles of 2nd Line Support Analyst which involved handling more complex incidents and requests from the business through to my current role as an Infrastructure engineer.
One of the first things you notice when working for Dick Lovett is how friendly and welcoming everyone is and how people always say hello as your moving around the dealerships. The next thing I think you spot is the prestige and pride that comes with representing the various manufactures.
I think one of my highlights of my time at Dick Lovett has been our Leadership Cohort trip to Brathay in the Lake District. It was a challenging but rewarding few days with various leadership activities that really tested us, and I feel very lucky and privileged to have had the opportunity.
Being in IT, I would love to see technology continue to take a role in positively affecting the customer journey. With vehicle sales starting to move online the showroom experience will become more important with the dealerships becoming a “destination” and I can see technology playing a massive role in this. The brands are doing some cool things now around configuring vehicles in the showrooms, and I can’t wait to see what they do next.
Part of my role in the infrastructure team is to investigate new technologies and to keep up with what the manufactures are implementing as well as finding ways to help staff improve the way they work and I think continuing to do this and really push some of the ideas we come up with will help to improve the customer journey and create that “destination feel”.
My hopes for the future with Dick Lovett are to continue progressing and learning and who knows where that might take me.
