If you are interested in joining Darren in the Technology Team please follow the link below.
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Darren joined The Cumberland 24 years ago when he started working in its branches before moving into IT where he now leads a team of 42 people.
I am in charge of all the technology that is needed to keep our business going. That includes our service desk team who help anybody who has got a technology issue and the infrastructure team who look after the databases, servers and networks we use. My teams include Service Desk who are the first point of contact for all issues, our Infrastructure teams which support our servers, networks, databases and applications, Business Support who look after system configuration and Service Assurance who deal with incidents, change & supplier management.
If anything does go off we aim to get it back on as quickly as possible and look at the root cause of why that happened to prevent future outages.
Our job is to maintain a high level of service for the business from our internal systems through to our customer facing ones including card transactions, internet banking and our mobile app.
And we also support our internal customers to make sure they have got what they need to do their job. Everyone from our branch teams to our back-office functions rely on us to keep things working.
July 1st 1999 was my first day at The Cumberland when I started as a branch assistant at our English Street branch in Carlisle. I then worked in the Dalston branch for two years followed by spells at Fisher Street and Silloth.
It was then that a job came up in our IT helpdesk which I applied for and got and moved to our IT team which was about 10 people at the time. From there I took a supervisory role within the team. In 2009,I then took on my first management role as customer service development manager. In 2012 I moved back to the IT/Technology team where I have progressed into the role I currently hold.
The Cumberland has given me a lot of training opportunities along the way both internally and externally including ITIL qualifications which are the industry standard for IT and Service Management jobs like mine
It’s all a long way from my original ambition at school which was to be a policeman. I knew when I was finishing my A levels that university wasn’t for me. Then when I saw The Cumberland advertising vacancies a lot of people around me were saying ‘get in there - it’s a really good place to work’.
Technical knowledge is great, but we are here to provide a service so if somebody has got good customer services skills, we can teach them the knowledge and skills needed for the job. If people have got that customer first approach, they are friendly and want to help people then that’s a good start. If it can be coupled with some technical knowledge that’s good, but we are more than happy to train and upskill people.
I appreciate that it is harder for younger people to show a great breadth of experience, but if you’ve been in a role where you've dealt with members of the public or interacted with others that could be key because communication is such a big part of our role.
Work can be challenging, but in a good way. New things are happening all the time, so we are all continually learning
We don’t have a blame culture. Yes, things can go wrong, and we need to understand why, but we accept that we are all human beings and mistakes happen. It’s how we prevent them from happening again which is our key focus.
It is a very, very good place to work and you know that you have got support at all levels. It’s a positive atmosphere and a good place to be, with fantastic people.
If you are interested in joining Darren in the Technology Team please follow the link below.