My Unipart Journey - Jayne Nixon

At Unipart we believe that our people make the difference. That's why we engage employees at all levels and support them to learn, develop, and grow. This in turn delivers high performance so we can deliver our customer promise.

Jayne Nixon, from Unipart Rail, told us how Unipart has supported her development over the last 33 years and why you're never to old to learn!

Jayne started her career at just 18 , when she was just three days too old to be able to do an apprenticeship with British Rail.

Her first role was in Stock Audit where she would be counting bits and parts. She soon moved to a finance role dealing with cash pay, which seems like a bizarre concept these days!

With her experience, she then moved to an after-sales team and was back in the warehouse. She quickly built relationships and developed her skills in The Unipart Way before eventually progressing to Warehouse Support Manager.

A job then came up which Jayne was interested in to work in the Quality Department in Rail, but she had no qualifications in this area. Because of Jayne’s skills and vast knowledge across various departments at Unipart Rail the business saw the potential of giving Jayne an opportunity to join Quality with further development. This saw Jayne undergo an apprenticeship to give her those additional skills around auditing to add to her strong skill set of process mapping and SOP management.

Jayne joined the quality team whilst completing her Level 4 Quality Practitioner apprenticeship, which she passed with a Distinction!

Jayne said about her development: “Although I found it challenging at times, I had full support from my line manager in order to balance my time and workload. It was great working with other people across different industries as we were able to share ideas and knowledge. The support network across the business was brilliant.”

The apprenticeship not only gave a benefit to Jayne professionally, it also delivered an improvement project within the Operations Support team in Hexthorpe.

Jayne has been with Unipart now for 33 years and is enjoying her role more than ever. It plays to all her strengths in terms of facilitating, mentoring, coaching and putting into practice her Lean & Six Sigma qualification.

When asked if she had any advice for others wanting to progress their career with Unipart she said: “Get rid of your traditional perception of apprenticeships, there is no age limit! You're never too old to learn and it’s available to everyone. So don’t let anything stop you going after what you want.”

If you’d like to explore development opportunities at Unipart, talk to your line manager. Personal Development Plans are a great tool available to you to set your goals, aspirations and pathways. Find out more about development conversations and creating a PDP on the eLMS here.

In recognition of Unipart’s 50th anniversary we asked Jayne to share a specific standout memory. She said: “I’ve had over 30 years of memories, but I would say my standout one is where I have been involved in 'talent' spotting and helping them within Unipart to progress into other areas.

“This is because one of the key factors of my time at Unipart has been the variety of people I have worked with - you spend many hours with them. If they had not been the people they are then I would not still be here.”