Erin Kemal’s progression story
Where did my career begin?
2010 was a big year for me. I had my son late in 2009 and as a new mum, I decided to move up from Hertfordshire back to Northamptonshire to be closer to my family. Within a few months of the move, I had been offered a job with a specialist plastic machining company in their technical sales department. This was not an area I had ever seen myself in, but I seemed to be able to sell most things so slotted seamlessly into the team.
Whilst working within the plastic arena it wasn’t long before I became very aware of igus®
After a year of working for this company, igus® became my key account and I was soon jumping through loops for Matt Aldridge and Rob Dumayne! Loops that, looking back were ridiculous!!
The start of the Erin Kemal igus® journey
In 2013, everything changed. Matt became Managing Director, Rob became dry-tech director and between them they had the evil plan of kidnapping me and making me work at igus® in the technical sales department. In all seriousness, I discussed it with the Managing director at the existing company before considering a job move to igus®. It was essential that the relationship between the two companies remained strong.
Starting in the technical sales was so daunting! I remember nearly crying when my colleague Jon Nixon went on holiday and I was responsible for looking after ALL the technical sales and enquiries, but I coped, obviously! In fact, as time went on my confidence grew and in 2018, I was promoted to inside sales team leader for the dry-tech department.
What happened in 2020?
Well, aside from the pandemic, I decided it was time for a new challenge and in February 2020, I joined the Marketing team to utilise my degree in English Literature as a content creator. The team had grown and changed direction over the previous 6 months and the digital side of igus® was evolving and I wanted to be part of it. I was in the role for 6 weeks before being sent home to work remotely, Covid had well and truly taken hold.
18 months on and I have gone from writing vast amounts of content to get the igus® UK blog up and running to building webpages, looking after the PR schedule, doing English corrections for German content, all whilst still writing content for the blog.
Changing direction for me was the best decision I ever made. It has allowed me to be more creative, work more independently than I had worked before and provided challenges that I think I have thrived on. Having the opportunity to develop different skills and continuing to grow has been exciting, hard work but very rewarding!
To view more progression stories of some other igus® employees please visit https://blog.igus.co.uk/?s=progression or to contact Erin directly click here to go to our contact page.
