Meet the team… Lyndsay Mann

Hi, I’m Lyndsay, I work at Armada’s Bromsgrove office as Training Manager. It’s was a massive career change for me, and before I started here I couldn’t have told you what AutoCAD or Revit were, but I’ve adapted really quickly; and I’m loving the challenge. On one of my first weeks for the company, I even attended our most popular course – AutoCAD Essentials – to get an idea of what it was like to be a delegate!

A typical work day for me tends to start at 6:00am, as I try and be good and go to the gym before getting into the office at about 8:45am; which gives me just about enough time to make my porridge (in a mug – not a bowl – much to the bemusement of my colleagues) and settle down at my desk before the phone starts ringing at 9am! The only way I manage to get myself out of bed so early is the thought of the chocolate bar or glass of wine I won’t feel so guilty about consuming that evening ????

My job role is predominately sales based, meaning I take majority of the phone calls that come into the office and also my fair share of the email enquiries that come through to the general Armada email addresses. If anyone has ever made an enquiry on our website using the Live Chat feature, it’s likely it’s me you will have talked to (not a robot like so many other websites).

This means I get to speak to such a variety of people from all over the UK, about such a wide mix of courses and requirements; it is a miracle I don’t get myself confused! That being said, there is rarely a day goes by that I don’t say something a little bit daft to someone on the phone…I’m just lucky that our clients realise that I am only human and we always end up having a laugh about it. I can assure you, there are no scripts for phone calls in our office! I have built up a great rapport with many of our regular clients since I joined Armada last year, and the formal talk that the conversations started with has gradually become more relaxed and casual whenever we speak.

Many people probably aren’t aware that we don’t solely offer scheduled training courses, but we also go out to client’s sites to host training. In any week, we can have anything from one to 10 of these courses running alongside our scheduled courses, so a big part of my job is to put all the arrangements in place for these courses. I have to make sure that we have covered every eventuality so that the training runs like clockwork…easier said than done sometimes with so many factors to take into account! I particularly like this aspect of my role, as I have often been the first point of contact from the clients’ initial enquiry, right the way through to course completion, so you build up quite a good relationship with the client.

When I am not talking to clients on the phone, or replying to emails, I do have to get my share of the office admin done. As a team, we have to ensure the course manuals are where they need to be, previous weeks delegates have all had their certificates, that the trainers know exactly where they need to be the following week, make sure the trainers accommodation has been booked for the coming weeks (which is nowhere near as fun when you aren’t the one staying in the hotel), and that other centres have all the other supplies they need; to name just a few! I can assure you that there is far more logistics involved in running a training company than you would ever think of. We would be lost without our trusty office whiteboard or Google Drive accounts to keep track of everything!

We are a small team here at Armada HQ, and some days are pretty manic to say the least. I won’t pretend that it’s not stressful on occasions, but the one thing you can count on is that we always have a laughter. Be it Steve playing snippets of silly music that he knows will get stuck in your head for the rest of the day, me admitting to doing something stupid that I probably shouldn’t admit to, or Matt winding Steve up about his football teams’ poor performance; we are all passionate about what we do.

Lyndsay