Professional June 2024

ONLINE LEARNING

REWARD

If you’re looking for an answer to the question “what is automatic enrolment?” then look no further than this course. It highlights employers’ challenges, responsibilities and obligations to all parties involved with pensions and auto-enrolment, to enable compliance. You will leave this course equipped with the knowledge and skills to administer this vital and much- changed arena. Automatic enrolment and pensions for payroll

completed without the team in place at the time. I still work with several great people from this time and treasure the relationships I have been able to build and maintain. The next great opportunity for me involved a change in geography as it meant a move to north-west London from Scotland and a chance to be payroll manager at JD Wetherspoon. Again, this meant new things for me, and running a weekly payroll of up to 36,000 people presented its own, specific challenges. This was again with a great team, so things never seemed as bad as they could be – and I will say that being paid to drink beer is a career highlight! Time for change My personal circumstances changed; our twin boys were born during our time in north-west London and somewhere in my heart a desire for purple heather and mist- covered hills had replaced the Californian beaches. A move back to Scotland ensued with a role at TSB Bank, which was just about to fully separate from Lloyds Bank after the financial crisis. This was a chance to start the payroll process from scratch and although initially the payroll was outsourced to a third-party provider, I launched a project to in-house the payroll and then successfully led the project to in-house the payroll process, build a new team from scratch and transfer the knowledge from the outsourcer in nine short months. TSB was then bought by a Spanish banking business and so needed a new human resource and payroll system, as we were still using one provided by Lloyds Bank under the TSA (transitional services agreement). This gave me an opportunity to spend a lot of time in Spain working with our colleagues to design and build a new system. In 2018, I was offered the chance to join Dayforce – Ceridian at the time – as it was re-entering the UK market with a new human capital management system after the previous sale of their European business. I was to lead the managed services function, which was responsible for the go-live for the first UK payroll in May 2018. In the past six years, the entire business has grown exponentially in Europe and globally with more than 6,300 customers worldwide. I had some fantastic opportunities and experiences at Dayforce,gaining involvement in many system implementation projects,

sales and prospect demos, working with operational and customer success teams, working alongside product development teams and many leadership opportunities. I have been able to travel in this role, working globally with customers and colleagues in a variety of locations including Hungary, Germany, Australia, New York, Las Vegas and Orlando. I really hope that this whistle-stop tour through my personal payroll career journey has shown some of the amazing opportunities that can be had if you choose to work in payroll and embrace everything the payroll world has to offer. Words of advice If I was to give anyone contemplating a career in payroll some of my thoughts, the few things that I would say to them are: l believe that payroll is a career, we are gaining more and more recognition for the work we do and the importance of our profession. The days of a chief payroll officer at the C-suite table will shortly be with us l know the importance of the work we do! We empower people to live their lives, provide a home and food for families, etc. Being named as ‘key workers’ throughout the Covid-19 pandemic and our amazing ability to work with an ever-changing minefield of rules and regulations showed our true worth to countries across the globe l don’t ever think that payroll just means processing end-to-end payroll – there’s a wide range of job types and skills needed to work in payroll. We need auditors, programmers, business analysts, tax and compliance experts, implementation consultants and training officers – as artificial intelligence and machine learning start to gain more importance in payroll processes, we will all need to embrace new technologies and different ways of working. I have been involved in projects to outsource, in-house and implement payrolls and can safely say that two days are never the same l if you want it, the opportunity for global travel exists within the payroll world. I’ve travelled to some fantastic places with work – even though I do often have to remind friends and families that it is work! Get involved in global payroll implementations if you really want to see the world and ensure you have enough room in your passport for all the stamps you will need. n

Visit cipp.org.uk/training to book your place

Member price: £395.00 + VAT Non-member price: £495.00 + VAT

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| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward |

Issue 101 | June 2024

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