External contributor / Jane Williams

Jane is an experienced qualified management accountant of some 18 years and has previously worked in both manufacturing private sector as well as in the NHS for the last 24 years.

Jane has worked in a variety of NHS organisations including acute secondary care, mental health, community and most recently in a CCG so her experience in mainly management accounting is extremely varied and she has worked both within larger teams as well as smallish teams (as now).

Jane has always had a passion and drive for training and development of co-team mates and of non-financial staff. She has undertaken various roles which involved planning and delivering finance training to a wide range of staff and clinicians which she has found very rewarding.

Her particular skills and experience in a lengthy career include dealing with the daily pressures of high workloads, and dealing with frequently changing priorities. Further to this, she has experience in learning how to use her time effectively, good time management skills, great communication skills, staff management and often being the unofficial “social secretary” for team events. Jane helps staff to think about and identify their training needs and helps to sign-post where to access training, project management principles including some involvement in procurement exercises and tendering, and presentation skills including how to tackle nerves in planning for doing a presentation.

Jane has a husband and twin daughters who are reaching the all challenging teenage years, and she feels that now is the right time to reach out and help other people, in the same way that she felt supported at times when she had a mentor.

She is very much a people person, rather than a technical/numbers kind of person; and she would like to offer her long and varied skills and experience to mentor someone who feels that they need some guidance and support – whether that is for an upcoming decision that needs to be made or for someone dealing with a challenging situation, or even just preparing for an interview or presentation.

Jane is an extrovert (according to the various personality profile tools she has undertaken) and certainly a 360 degree exercise with views from her co-workers and managers and budget holders did bear this out. She has had to work hard not to launch in with advice before listening fully. Jane believes that she has the skills to adapt her approach to both other extroverts and introverts alike, especially having undertaken the mentoring programme put on.