JAJA

Gateline Assistant

At our busiest stations you’ll find automatic ticket barriers. Making sure they work effectively for our customers are our Gateline Assistants – the public face of our fair, helpful, safe and secure service. Take on this role and, drawing on your confident people skills, you’ll deal with enquiries, ticket/pass checking, problem solving and ensuring everything runs as smoothly as possible.

Professionalism under pressure is the key to succeeding in this role. You’ll handle a variety of situations and use your judgement to respond in the best way. What’s certain, if you’re calm, organised and communicative, you’ll be at a distinct advantage.

To apply for this role, you must:

  • be over 18 years old
  • be able to travel to and from your allocated station independently
  • be experienced in working within teams and alone
  • be able to consistently work flexible hours
  • pass a medical examination, including drugs and alcohol screening

Profile

Jaja says... I’ve been with First Great Western for over six months now and my job responsibilities include helping customers to go through the barriers, ensuring their safety as well and giving customers information about train times and also trying to display good customer service skills to the customer.

As a gate line assistant you’re the first person a customer sees and the last person a customer sees. When the customers come through your appearance matters a lot. The smile on your face, your tone of voice, the way you approach the customers, that shows them you are approachable.

The most important thing of my job is I meet up to 500 to 1000 people every day and I try to make, at least, all of them happy. I can have a customer that’s not feeling well or a customer that’s upset because they’ve missed their train. Because of how I’ve been trained I’ll be able to actually convince them they’re going to get on the next train and actually make them happy again and so that has actually helped me as well.

To be a staff member at First Great Western you need to be approachable, you need to be a very, very lively person, you need to be very, very open minded, you need to always have that smile on you, you need to be eager to learn, you want to aspire more, you want to grow.

There are actually loads of people that work around me from all different walks of life, from all different origins, different countries, different races and because we actually have the same goal of actually trying to win a customer’s loyalty we’re actually happy, the morale is great and we work together and we’re actually like a family.

I’ve been so proud of myself working for First Great Western whereby I’m actually ready to aspire more to actually go over as a train manager and I’m very proud that there’s a way for me to actually improve and to actually go forward in life.