To mark the 25th anniversary of the merger of Trowbridge, Lackham and Chippenham colleges to form Wiltshire College, we are featuring staff who have served the college before and since the merger.
Ronnie Cross only joined the customer service staff at Trowbridge College for a three-month temporary role – 34 years later she is still here and says she has never been happier.
These days she is an Management Information Systems (MIS) Business Partner but walking through the doors in 1991, she would never have guessed it would still be her place of work all these years later.
From temporary role to long-term career
“I didn’t intend to stay because I didn’t really enjoy the public-facing role,” she says. “It was supposed to be a temporary job for three months until Christmas and then they kept me on and I ended up doing three years.”
When an opportunity came up to join the marketing team she jumped at it and was part of the team for six years until the colleges merged. The marketing department moved to Lackham and, as Ronnie had a young son, travelling there was not an option.
In some ways it was a blessing in disguise because the MIS role came up. “I really enjoyed marketing but I have always been a bit of a data nerd so it was an ideal job for me,” she said.
Working through change
“The merger felt a bit daunting to begin with but we had the same systems on every site and eventually it all came to Trowbridge,” she recalls. “We go to every site and that is good, it has made the job interesting.”
Thanks to the advances in technology the job is a world away from the role she took in 2000. “All the registers were done manually in those days and we had to go out and collect them, they looked like lottery cards and went through a scanner to record whether students were present or not,” she recalls.
“It used to take most of a day to scan and write the reports for that day, and then the next day I’d take all of them back and pick up the next batch. We worked two days behind because I couldn’t do it all in the day it happened.
“It’s all online now and it is recorded instantly, so technology has completely changed the job.”
Still enjoying the journey
Her role now is far more about planning and analysing data. “We are very involved in planning courses,” she says. “In January we meet the heads of department and they decide which courses they want to continue. We tell them how much the course will generate for the college depending on how many people they have on it. It’s really interesting being more involved in the funding side than just registers and timetables.”
Another notable change has been in enrolment days. “When I first started at Trowbridge it was just one day and the students used to queue around the block,” she recalls. “ Now it’s over four days on all four campuses and we don’t know which site we’re going to go on, it might be in Salisbury or Chippenham for four days, and we sit there and enrol. It’s a much nicer experience.”
Again, technology has shown a marked improvement for staff doing the job. Says Ronnie: “We used to enrol somebody by using a card with the course written on it and some coloured dots, and when somebody enrolled you took off the coloured dot and put it on the person’s card and then filed it alphabetically,.
“It’s incredible that we’ve gone from that to the digital process we use now in 25 years.”
Looking back on her 34 years she has no regrets about taking up that customer experience job. “I’ve always enjoyed it here,” she says. “I’ve always been so lucky with my managers, who have always been good. They have all embraced what I want out of the job and encouraged me.”
Read more staff stories from across Wiltshire College & University Centre
As part of our 25th anniversary celebrations, we’re sharing the experiences of long-serving staff who have helped shape the college over the past quarter-century.
