I’ve been working at the Insolvency Service for 14 years.
I started my journey there as an agency staff at admin post and then secured permanent contract as a case officer with Official Receiver’s services. In 2009 I moved to Long Term Asset and Distribution Team and now manage a busy Property team (Family homes & Charging orders) as it is the only team in the UK that deals with the insolvent individual’s family homes. I am responsible for the delivery of different teams set objectives and activities that we have agreed to do this year. I also hold the responsibility to support the delivery of ministerial and agency targets and to build strategic relationships across the agency and with our external stakeholders.
Alongside my ‘day job’, I have a huge passion for spreading the message of equality, feminism and the right life choices not only within our organisation but also with other government departments, local communities and young people. In 2010 I volunteered as an Events Organiser for our local charity, which I continuously still take part in, as well as being a Chair of the charity. As a Chair I managed to deliver one of my long-term projects where I set up Lithuanian language classes for children aged 4 to 15 at our Supplementary School. As a result, I have built new working relationships across our community and external stakeholders sharing best practice and developed an action plan. This was done with the aim of making sure a difference can be made when helping the children of our community and that they would be impacted in the most effective and positive way from this. Currently our school is becoming popular in our county and is forever expanding. This can be seen from our recent achievement where we were presented with the Golden Award from the National Resource Centre of Supplementary Education.
At work, I am a deputy Chair for the Women’s Network Group, a member of the Employee Assistance Programme (EAR) and also a member of the Cross Government Women’s Network Group. I am very passionate about the idea of wanting to do more to improve the talent pipeline and provide a venue for women to support each other. I find that I am not afraid to be challenged as I have organised and hosted various events across our organisation. This includes members which genuinely engage across the business, from which networking for senior leaders to women with aspirations have been arranged in result. This involved working with the local river Orwell Beach Clean, Equaliteas and Suffragette flag relay. As a result, our network is now greatly expanding.
In November 2018 I joined the Civil Service Young Leadership Academy and took leadership of a project where as a team we are aiming to come up with an interactive and educational tool for children aged 7 to 9. Consequently, this will help them make the right choices and at the same time promote Civil Service. With the increased violence, cyberbullying, drugs and children grooming I cannot stay back and do-nothing. Children at this age don’t take the time to deeply reflect and raise their own self-awareness about their innermost desires and can be influenced by peers or “bad” adults. Our children are our future. Being a mum of 3 I deeply understand this concern and want to be an advocate to children like so where I can provide a sense of guidance and be someone who can help children to understand who they are and what they value. Additionally, I am also responsible for the liaison with the education department and local schools to run the project and already managed to gain great results with the project.
Over the years, I’ve worked on a various exciting projects with tight deadlines that I’ve managed to stick to and always achieve a positive end result. From this, I have built strong relationships with colleagues across the whole organisation and with external stakeholders across Civil Service and external Government. As a result, I’ve managed to develop some of those relationships into successful collaborative projects.
In my management roles I’ve learned to manage people who are paid to do their job as well as managing volunteers thus allowing me to work with a range of people with different work ethics. By widening my challenges at work, I feel that am forever expanding my awareness, learning new ways to better myself and allow myself to learn from my mistakes. Doing so, this allows me to refine my management style on a daily basis. Learning new skills is something that I find is very important and so I strongly believe that everyone should be given a chance to learn and develop their skills to allow them to do their job well. Staff’s development and training is the most important enabling factor that enhances organizational capabilities. At the same time, I want to help staff to understand why their job is important and what role they play in overall organisational delivery. I believe that the best factor within a work place is when you can trust people you work with and you let them have that freedom. Naturally I sometimes face some challenging situations in my role and occasionally must make tough decisions. To enable myself to positively resolve them I use skills such as positive attitude, resilience and proactive approach.
From this, I consider myself as being hard working and well organised and committed to do well individual and will strive to deliver excellent results.