People in Lighting: Yasmin Graham

Companies are defined by the people who work for them: for over a century, Schréder has been at the forefront of lighting thanks to its employees worldwide. Life@Schréder is where we tell the stories of the people who make Schréder what it is, taking in the 70 countries where we do business, diverse career trajectories and our collective dedication to excellence in lighting.
 

Yasmin Graham joined Schréder in August 2021, when she came to work at Sylvania, which was acquired by Schréder in 2020 as part of their purchase of Gerard Group’s lighting division. She works in Application Support as part of a team known internally as the “Swiss Army Knife.” This team keeps everything moving on an administrative level, enabling our engineers to build flagship projects such as NorthConnex, a nine-kilometre long, two-tube, twin-lane tunnel in Sydney. 

I'm originally from the Philippines...

I was born there and I came to Australia when I was 18. I studied accounting, so my first jobs were in finance. I moved to a customer service role at a company called Clipsal, which was part of the Gerard Lighting Group. I moved to Pierlite, another part of the Gerard Group for practical reasons – they were moving the Clipsal office and my son was young at the time, so I swapped an hour’s drive for a 10-minute one – and I’ve stayed in lighting ever since! 
 

I became an Analyst…

At Pierlite I also worked in Customer Service, working in different sections at different times; collecting order entries, expediting products, and estimating projects with product recommendations. By then I knew how all the systems worked, so I was a good candidate to cover for a colleague who was going on maternity leave, so I was trained to become a pricing and rebate analyst. 
 

In 2021 I moved to Schreder…

Angélia Fonseca, for whom I had previously worked at Gerard Lighting Group, had joined Schréder with the acquisition. She had always encouraged me to try different roles and suggested I apply. So I joined the Information Systems team in 2021 as Application Support, reporting to Debbie Connolly.
 

I look after our database and systems…

Anything that needs to be created or updated in the system. So, for example, product codes that need to be created for our new assets, and maintaining the existing systems, is part of my role. If someone needs a report to see how a particular product is performing, I’ll help them with that. People come to us from every team, every part of the business, and we just have to keep everything ticking over. We’ve known Movex, the system we use, for a very long time, so we get requests from everyone.

Schréder is a very large company…

It's definitely been an adjustment to be owned by a company based overseas, with Schréder's headquarters in Belgium. We hear a lot of good things about the company's future and plans, especially when it comes to corporate social responsibility – we have a great Together for Our Future strategy. It's also good that we can work from home. I come into the office most of the time, but since the Covid pandemic things have become more flexible. We also finish early on Fridays, in line with the factory hours, which is a nice perk.
 

And the people make the company what it is... 

I've been working with more or less the same people for over 10 years now. They're really like a family to me; we even get together at weekends sometimes. But only sometimes! I like to help colleagues and am always asked to fill in gaps in people's knowledge.

My favourite project we have worked on...

Just yesterday my husband and I were talking about Grand Central Station in New York. And then we said that the new refurbishment of Sydney Central Station looks even better; it's been completely rebuilt and looks absolutely brilliant. So I said to my husband, we did some of the lighting, we're part of it!
 

Outside of work…

Family is everything to me - I'm devoted to my husband and two sons. I'm also very active in our church; we're Baptist and faith is very important to our family. By the time you've seen a few friends, the weekend is over. I also have to look after my younger son during the school holidays.