Rebecca George, Director of UK Government Business, IBM UK

Rebecca George has recently been appointed to her current position, in which she is responsible for managing the relationship between IBM and the UK Government. Prior to this appointment, she managed a business process re-engineering project to web-enable all European, Middle East and Africa

recruitment for IBM.

She has been with IBM since 1988, in sales for 5 years, then participated in the early business transformation projects which would eventually change the way IBM operates. She developed an interest in career frameworks and skill development, and, working as part of a global team, created and implemented sales and marketing career paths in IBM UK.

In 1996 she moved to America, into HR, and into line management, and spent two years on assignment as the Global HR Partner for the IBM Consulting Group, adding Systems Integration in North America in her second year. As HR Partner, she was responsible for ensuring that new Global Services businesses had all the appropriate people management processes in place to accommodate rapid change and growth. She returned to the UK in late 1997 and spent two years as HR Partner for Global Services Region North, an 18,000 person business spanning four countries. In late 1999 she moved to head up the recruitment function, with the challenges of hiring around 13,000 people, re-engineering the recruitment process and organisation (of 250 people across 43 countries), designing and implementing a cost recovery model, revitalising IBM's external recruitment image, attracting more women and implementing a multilingual web-based recruitment tool.