Work Experience with Alice Rossi, studio manager, Igloo Regeneration

Stuart Watson, Regeneration & Renewal, 13 June 2008

What has been your most beneficial career experience to date? Working at the Manchester Community Technical Aid Centre, which aims to help people improve their neighbourhoods, showed me what organisations can achieve when profit is not the main driver. After 20 years working for a bank, it changed my perspective.

What's the best advice you've been given? When I was working for Barclays bank and had to decide whether to lend money, the directors there asked me: "Would you lend it if it was your own money?" You can apply that to cost control and budgeting for anything you do at work.

What's the best training you've had? I did an Open University degree in human geography because I had become interested in the environment, and that enabled me to make the career change to the Manchester Community Technical Aid Centre and Igloo. It led to changes in my lifestyle too: I cycle to work most of the time, and have an allotment.

What book would you recommend? Happiness: Lessons From a New Science by Richard Layard. It was a really helpful reference point when we were developing the new wellbeing, health and happiness theme for our investment policy, because it questions some common beliefs about what makes people happy: in particular the idea that more money makes you happy.

What do you wish you'd known when you started out? That you don't have to work in a bank all your life. When I started out in my career it was all jobs for life, but that has completely changed. Now I know that people have power over their own careers; if you want to change something, you can.

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS

1983: Leaves school and joins Barclays bank as a risk analyst and corporate lending manager before becoming a change manager on IT projects.

2002: Joins the Manchester Community Technical Aid Centre, organising projects to reclaim green spaces and leading a community projects team.

2007: Becomes studio manager at Igloo Regeneration.