Laura started work at Auriga 11 years ago straight out of college as an Office Junior, after gaining an Advanced Diploma in Office Technology. One year after being at Auriga Laura was promoted to an Administration Assistant. When the Office Manager left she was asked to take on extra duties including facilities, IT and the telephone system.
For five years Laura continued working in administration, gaining considerable knowledge of the breadth of work and processes at Auriga. In 2015 her role began to focus more on IT and she trained herself to understand the details of different IT issues. She did this by shadowing our external IT providers, quickly developing the ability to communicate and resolve reporting issues – and address the IT problems of her ‘non-technical’ colleagues.
This led to Laura gaining a promotion to the IT Technical Support Officer role in 2017, where she had a much wider variation in responsibilities. The constant change in IT, security and innovation within the business gave Laura new responsibilities – and this was a step-ahead for her career.
After two years as the IT Technical Support Officer Laura was ready for the next stage in her career; in 2020 she was appointed as our IT Manager. She said she felt she had ‘grown and changed’ with the company, moving from administration, to a technical role and then into responsibility for direction and planning IT. Laura now enjoys engaging across many areas of the company. Her current tasks include IT Audits, Cyber Essentials, penetration testing, liaising with external IT companies, help setting up new contracts, telephone systems and general IT support.
In 2019 Laura completed training with the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) the IT industry’s top trade association. She gained professional certification, covering; installing, maintaining, customising, and operating personal computers. Laura said ‘taking the exam was the most challenging thing I’ve done since leaving college. After the training I had to revise hard, learning a huge volume of information before taking two exams. It is a valuable qualification and I was happy with my score’.
Laura has played a critical role in ensuring Auriga remains fully operational despite the Covid-19. Mark Abrams, CEO at Auriga describes Laura as ‘unflappable and eager to help in any way she can’. Becoming a manager has also enabled her to focus on things she is passionate about, like Crystal Reports, as she likes getting important and insightful information to those who need it to do their jobs.
One aspect of her work that she’s most proud of, is the new database, website and portal for the British Gas Energy Savings Trust. Laura enjoyed the challenge of a quick turnaround and working collaboratively across the business.
Laura has a strong focus on digital services and this has led the implementation of a completely new IT infrastructure at Auriga using Remote Desktop Services – implemented just a week before the office closed due to Covid-19. Without the planning and implementation work of the previous 5 months, this would have been impossible, and the company would only have been able to support around a third of external users during the early lockdown period.
