What I’d say to me back then - River Island’s Meriel Neighbour on why job-hopping pays off

Hotel manager and driving instructor aren’t the traditional route into a career in technology. But this is the path that led Meriel Neighbour to her current role as Head of Technology Delivery and Transformation at River Island, via digital roles at a multitude of retail giants.

Working in hospitality at the start of her career, Neighbour’s ambition was very much about progressing through the ranks within a hotel and becoming a general manager. She explains:

I thought that was going to be the pinnacle of my career. It was going to take me a long time to get there in a very much a man's world.

Her grand plan was to then write a book about her experiences and lengthy journey working her way to the top, revealing how as a woman, you could get to become a general manager of a hotel. But she achieved that goal much quicker than she’d expected, so that plan went out the window.

After running a couple of hotels as general manager, Neighbour moved into pub and bar concept and design, using her creative side, before moving into a head office environment, applying the customer skills she’d acquired to gaps within the market within pubs, bars and restaurants. She adds:

I went into that strategic side of things in terms of creating those brand designs, and worked with some external third party. So starting to branch out with working with those people and different companies and being able to manage them, and that morphed me into project management in terms of they put me through PMP [Project Management Professional] courses and Prince back in the day.

Crash landing

But then came an economic crash, and Neighbour was made redundant, leading to a refocusing of her next steps. She explains:

I learned to be a driving instructor during that time, because I didn't have a job for quite a long period of time, which can be disheartening. It was during a period of time where I'd lost my father as well. So there were lots of compounding things playing on my mind and what I was going to do.

Spurred on by her love of shopping, Neighbour started to apply for roles around fashion. She secured a job as e-commerce programme manager at Matches Fashion, which was planning to launch a website presence. Given just three months to launch the site, it went live with one day to spare: 

That was my first experience into really working with deadlines, and absolutely loved it, the hard work, the commitment, the long days, long hours, collaborating with lots of different people, creating that real experience and bringing it to life. And that's where my foray into technology started.

Across all the different iconic British brands Neighbour has worked for, from Selfridges and Boots to Hobbs and Ted Baker, all of her work has been around building something to enhance customer experience. She adds:

This has all led to where I am in River Island through some enormous global transformations at places like Ted Baker and Clarks that have run concurrent big projects for both point of sale and e-commerce.

Along the way, she also completed an almost two-year stint at the Post Office, although she was quick to point out she wasn’t responsible for the scandal-hit Horizon system, joining many years after the controversial Fujitsu software system began sending innocent subpostmasters to prison. She notes:

I was putting some of that right, not creating the problem.

When it comes to securing so many top jobs at these renowned brands, Neighbour attributes her success to a mix of approaches, including building a strong network, and sometimes being the right person in the right place at the right time. She adds:

Some of it, I've had to go after those jobs. So if I've seen a job that I really, really wanted, I've had to go off and do stuff about it, going and finding people that know people that know people, using those networks to enable that. Some of it has been using agencies, I'm not shy of that as well. I know they've made money out of me, but also they've offered me fantastic opportunities.

Double standards

Compared to her initial days in the technology sector around 15 years ago, Neighbour feels the engineering space is still quite a tough place to be as a woman. She explains:

Females have to go the extra mile to prove themselves capable versus a man - I'm not saying it's right - and they can go to the same university, do the same course, but the man will get the job versus the female. Females have to go a bit extra. So instead of perhaps just a bachelor degree, they need to go and get a master's degree. If a man needs one year's experience, a woman might need three or four years experience. I still think that exists, but that also potentially might be a cultural divide, because an awful lot of our engineers are not necessarily UK, they are from different cultures around the world, and so therefore there's a cultural bias in terms of male-female side of things.

In Neighbour’s world of digital transformation, programme management and e-commerce, while there are females in senior CIO and CTO positions, some people still think that technology is a man's world. She adds:

I hope that that will change in the future. There are lots of people female-wise that are at my level, and I think we've all done a fantastic job in achieving where we've got to. But getting into that next C-suite level and even board is more challenging for females still.

This needs to be tackled from a top-down perspective in some respects, according to Neighbour, as there has to be an openness for the board and C-suite to accept females into what has been traditionally a male role, and vice versa. She notes:

For example, in retail, if you look at buying and merchandising traditionally, you have females in those C-suite roles, but actually, there's no reason why a man can't do those roles. And likewise, in technology, traditionally, it's a man, why can't a woman?

Another challenge Neighbour cites is that women have to want to be in those roles and want the exposure to all the pressure that brings with it. She says:

Technology is a pressurized environment. Everybody looks to you to enable them to do whatever it is they want to do within the business, so it is highly pressurized. And if something fails and you need support, everybody's saying five minutes, five minutes, and five minutes feels like hours to be able to fix the problem. You have to have that ambition to be in that C-suite space as a female.

Collaborate and don’t listen

If she could go back and have a conversation with her younger self venturing into the world of work, the first piece of advice she’d share would be to learn about collaboration sooner. In hospitality, workers are often siloed into their department and don't necessarily get to cross collaborate. She notes:

I learned that quite late on in my hospitality career as I became a General Manager. I would tell myself never lose sight of customer experience and make sure that you stay up to date with all the trends that are out there.

Another tip for young Meriel would be to ignore the noise around regular job moves. She explains:

A lot of people will turn around and criticize me for having moved jobs quite so frequently. Lots of people say, oh, you should stay in a job for 10 years.

But Neighbour counters that she’s learned through every single job she’s had, and so would reassure her younger self not to be scared of changing jobs every two and a half to three years. She adds:

Take every learning that you can get and apply that learning into the next role. And if there are periods of time where you find yourself redundant, unemployed, make sure that you keep yourself busy. Whatever it is that you're doing, learning online, in person, talking to people. Grow your network, use your network, and build your network as you go through your life because it will stand you in good stead every step of the way.

The idea of networking would have absolutely petrified her in the early stage of her career. She notes:

I wasn't one of those people that had loads of people as friends when I was younger. I had two or three very close friends that I still have today, going back to school years and university years. That takes me out of my comfort zone in terms of that networking piece, but I would absolutely tell myself to learn to work with it.