22 Jul 2022
Get to know Jamie Roberts, Commercial Retail Trainer, as he details a day in his life.
As a trainer, I deliver a wide and vast amount of content that is incredibly important. Be it ensuring our new starters are protected from cyber-attacks, understanding the process of what to do in a marauding firearms attack, or giving our trainees the correct safety information; the day of a trainer is a hard one to write about as no two days are the same!
Some days we’ll be delivering a wealth of information to trainees, others we’ll be reviewing training courses, risk assessments, in and out of meetings or ensuring our competencies are up to date. These competencies include my frontline station staff competency and my trainer’s competency.
My stations competency includes, to name a few:
- Setting up and operating the gate line
- Maintenance of equipment, faults, and failures
- The selling and issuing of tickets
- Cash Handling
- STAR Mobile and STAR Desktop operation
- Offering customer service and passenger assistance
To ensure our competencies are up to date, we complete or deliver the relevant area. Then write up competency logs about our experiences or offer peer-to-peers amongst the trainers or manager. This is a great way to ensure we’re keeping up to date and allows us to continually reflect and keep developing. So, there is quite a lot to fit into a day!
A day in the life
A usual day starts at a nice early time of 7am (what’s a 9-5?). I use this time to reduce emails I’ve received and then prepare for the day ahead. Making sure all the tech is working, preparing flip charts and all the other training requirements before delivering the course.
09.30 is usually when the fun starts… look and listen to me time! Sometimes we’ll spend the whole day in the classroom, and others we’ll start in the classroom and before migrating across to Cardiff Central station. This is to observe our customers, complete ramp assessments (which all station staff are trained on to ensure they understand how to deliver passenger assistance), and look at safety measures in person. The day would then typically finish around 4pm, where I then go back to my emails and start to think about the next day.
Jamie’s ‘journey’
I have been a trainer here for nearly four years and in this time, I have learned so much. My career started off on the railway as a Customer Service Steward in catering. I found this was brilliant at giving me an introduction to the railway and really cemented the geographical knowledge I needed to move me in the right direction.
After that I became a Customer Service Advisor, where I did shifts in the ticket office, on the gateline, and as a Station Environmental Operative, cleaning and completing maintenance at other stations. This is testament to how good the opportunities are here. To anyone who has recently joined us, if you want to one day progress and move up, then the opportunities are there for you!
As a trainer, seeing young people join the rail industry is amazing. It’s great that we’re inspiring people from all aspects of society. We all know how great an industry the railway is, so it’s great that we get to play a part in inspiring the next generation of rail workers.
Get to know Jamie...
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
People – I love spending time with people so as soon as I’m awake, I need to find out of what’s happening and who’s about. One of the many reasons I love being a trainer!
What is your motto or personal mantra?
Whatever it is, just don’t worry about it. Sometimes I feel people get too worried about the little things!
What is your guilty pleasure?
Crisps – I can take or leave chocolate. But crisps are just too good…
