Marketing Services - Seven and a half years

I have worked in science and technology publishing since leaving college. Before joining Elsevier, I worked for the Wiley publishing company in Export Sales. At the time, it only had 20 staff in the London team and opportunities were limited.

I had friends working at Elsevier who had good things to say about working at the firm, so I applied for the role of Sales Support Manager within the Journals team in London. This role soon expanded to incorporate other areas of the business and evolved into International Sales Operations Manager with a team of four.

I certainly landed on my feet - I was given the opportunity of a secondment in New York for six months to help consolidate two sales operations teams following the purchase of another company. This was an amazing experience for me, giving me the opportunity to live in a different culture, and gain a greater understanding of both the size and scope of Elsevier.

On my return to the UK, I got involved with a number of large projects, the rollout of a new advertising system and a project to review the email service provider marketplace and produce a recommendation for a bulk email solution that would better meet future e-marketing strategy.

The ESP project, in particular, brought a lot of contact with the Marketing Systems Team, and led to my next move into the role of Senior Business Analyst. This was a new position which I could shape and develop as I saw fit, and an opportunity that I might not have been given elsewhere without more formal business analysis qualifications. Elsevier, however, trusted in my business knowledge and previous experience which is something I’ve always really appreciated. Within two years of taking on this new role, the department manager left to take up a position with Reed Business Information, which led to my promotion to Marketing Systems Manager.

I now manage a team of seven, developing and supporting marketing systems, and managing their training programmes. Understanding our customers is essential to Elsevier’s success and Marketing System’s role is key to that success. We consolidate data collected from various sources around the company into one central marketing database and provide the infrastructure to enable marketing to analyse and segment that data, and execute marketing campaigns.

In total, we support about 200 users worldwide and I still get the chance to travel to other Elsevier locations a couple of times a year to meet customers and colleagues, and promote our work.

I believe that if you’ve the drive and enthusiasm, and are prepared to work hard, there are definitely opportunities here for you. I can’t really see myself going anywhere else, providing the job stays interesting and new opportunities continue to arise. Since things don’t stand still for long at Elsevier, I’m sure that will be the case for sometime!

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