PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
When we
were young
A lot has changed in the payroll profession during the last forty years. TimKelsey FCIPPAIPA, CIPP trainer , fondly remembers
I joined the payroll profession in October 1988 pretty much the way that everyone did back then – by accident. I had been appointed as an executive officer for the Medical Research Council (MRC). In this first grade of management you were expected to be a generalist and able to perform any administrative task asked of you. On arrival I was informed that I had been assigned the payroll department because “you have used a computer”. The fact that my computer experience consisted of a three-month stint running a computerised bread ordering project in a supermarket – which mainly involved ploughing through page after page of
computer printouts ticking delivered loaves of bread off against the records – was irrelevant. In the eyes of my employer I was qualified to run a computerised payroll! I was working in the head office of the UK’s premier publicly-funded medical research organisation – a centre housing several hundred employees – in which there were only six ‘computers’ in the entire building: four in payroll and two in pensions. In reality these ‘computers’ were dumb terminals shared across the team of sixteen – you didn’t get one each. Their purpose was for the input of data, which was all prepared manually, and then transmitted by very slow telephone
line access. The next day the output arrived, and all the manual data had to be ticked back against pages of that green- lined concertina paper – which younger members of the profession probably only saw at nursery for drawing their first masterpieces of art. A sure sign that one of the parents worked in a payroll office with ready access to supplies of said paper. My first two mentors, Frances and Pat, had started their careers in payroll at the end of world war two, at the tender age of fifteen, and were still decidedly ‘old school’. Everything was required to be written in long-hand and triplicate copies kept. Nothing was ever thrown away, to the extent that we had a filing cabinet storing old Letts office desk calendars going back to 1952. Without the internet you couldn’t just pop online and discover a calendar from a previous year, and in those days – particularly with regard to requests for back-dated pensions earnings enquiries – we used those old calendars rather more often than you might have thought. I only dared throw them out after both Frances and Pat had retired. Whilst we had – at the time – a state of the art UNIPAY payroll system there were many tasks it did not perform and ...written in long-hand and triplicate copies kept...
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | April 2020 | Issue 59 16
Made with FlippingBook - Online magazine maker