Mike Beard Email & Phone Number

Greater Manchester, England, United Kingdom

I am currently helping with the Greater Manchester Local Nature Recovery Strategy (LNRS) and Pathways2Resilience. This has included extensive GIS mapping work with QGIS and analysis of data from public and stakeholder surveys.

Greater Manchester

Running until the end of March 2024, Natural Course is a LIFE IP funded ground-breaking collaborative water management project which brings together the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, the Environment Agency, Natural England, United Utilities and the Rivers Trust. My role within the project is focused upon ecological and environmental surveys and data - with volunteer assistance where it is appropriate, which will enhance community engagement with conserving the rivers. During April and May 2024 I assisted with closing down the project.

Greater Manchester, England, United Kingdom

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

The Energy Saving Trust is the UK's leading impartial organisation helping people save energy and reduce carbon emissions. They do this by providing expert insight and knowledge about energy saving, supporting people to take action, helping local authorities and communities to save energy and providing quality assurance for goods, services and installers.● Co-ordinated regression testing for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Rollup 16. Turned the methods applied into a template for future regression testing by EST in Scotland.● Used 64-bit Excel, PowerPivot and QGIS to combine and filter over one million records. Followed by spatial analysis and reporting.● Project assistant and tester for a complex web and Dynamics CRM project involving four external partners. My activities included: -- Assisted with software testing, diagnosis and impact analysis of issues as they arose, and liaison with the developers. -- Actively involved in maintaining the Issue Logs. -- Created a clear, concise and informative user guide. -- Main point of liaison and technical problem resolution for EST and Advice Centre staff.● Utilised Rapid Application Development and prototyping to develop a user-friendly MS Access database to help identify changes within CRM data and format them to assist entry into a web application. ● Fire Warden, IT Support SuperUser, member of office sustainability group, and assisted the organisation of weekly badminton club.

Edinburgh

Sub-contractor assisting with bat surveys.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

DESS is a unique course run by the Scottish Wildlife Trust and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, Scottish Wildlife Trust and the kind contributions of members and volunteers. During the 18-month programme, ten trainees will learn a variety of nationally recognised survey methodologies and receive intensive training on species identification for a wide variety of animals and plants.

Rolling fixed term contract within their Countryside and Nature Conservation Department in Edinburgh. Initially to review their biological data management. This involved rapidly gaining an understanding of their current data holding and methods of handling it, the needs of The Trust and third parties, and then recommending and implementing a database and digitisation project.Then the role required the quantification, collation and digitisation of wildlife records into a Recorder 6 database from a variety of sources. Procedures and progress reports were created in liaison with experts within and outside the Trust. Volunteers were recruited and managed. In addition, colleagues were encouraged to provide more data, and to make better use of what was available. This included training and facilitating the use of geographical information with MapInfo and the National Biodiversity Network Gateway.

Sussex, Working Remotely

Working with the finance team to create a bank statement reconcilliation system using Microsoft Access.

Sussex

A varied role as Analyst Programmer for the UK arm of this global luxury cosmetics company based in Haywards Heath. Also assisted other Gucci Group companies before YSL Beauté was sold to L’Oréal in 2008.● UK project facilitator for a global implementation of Oracle JDE Enterprise One, ensuring that everybody in this complex team was kept informed, knew what was expected of them and that the correct facilities were available for all meetings. ● Made responsible for quickly and accurately extracting and formatting financial data ready for import into new systems. This was achieved using Microsoft Access, Excel and CSV files.● Technical lead for commencing to ‘Direct Debit’ customers. Discovering, investigating, proving and finally overcoming problems with the available software packages.● Analysed, proposed, implemented and continued to oversee an expansion of electronic document management, including switching to a better scanning bureau and negotiating a 32% saving.● Selected to work with a small team of managers to diagram employee’s roles and tasks for an efficiency drive.● Received glowing praise for work completed as IT representative liaising with suppliers during the design, modification, testing and installation of a new human resources system.● Designed, programmed and documented an application to amalgamate financial management reporting for group companies within the UK with differing charts of accounts, which was subsequently adopted by other countries within the group. ● Devised and coded various Microsoft Access and Excel macros to assist a finance department to become more efficient.● Project leader and analyst for three product data synchronisation propositions from customers and their chosen Data Pool provider.

Bachelor Of Arts (Ba), Business Information Systems

Certificate In Field Botany