Two fleet directors will be sharing insights from their unconventional journeys into the sector in 2025’s Fleet and Mobility Live.

Visitors to this exclusive Fleet News experience on October 7-8 at NEC, Birmingham, can attend ‘from outsider to trailblazer – my fleet journey’, running each day at the event's Strategy & Leadership theatre.

Stewart Lightbody, head of group fleet at SureServe, will be chairing both sessions, and will be joined by:

• Rob Simister, director of fleet operations at Centrica – speaking on October 7.
• Nigel Allsop, fleet account director at BT Group – speaking on October 8.

These two discussions will draw attention to the variety of ways that fleet professionals can enter the sector, with both Simister and Allsop taking advantage of very different career paths to bring outsider perspectives and nuances into their respective fleets.

Before joining Centrica, Simister (pictured above) developed a career in media, software and gaming – holding positions at Xbox and Microsoft.

Speaking to Fleet News earlier in the year, Simister expressed his passion for the automotive industry, and explained how the skills he acquired in previous positions made him the ideal candidate to run Centrica’s fleet.

“I’ve had a solid background as my bedrock, with skills from enterprise sales and working with the C-suite that are pertinent in a corporate like this with the number of vehicles we have. I’m very aligned with process ways of working.

“I also have an outsider’s view, something I also had when I arrived in the gaming and IT industries.”

In contrast, Allsop (pictured above) served across 19 positions for 26 years at BT and its Openreach subsidiary before taking the reins of the group’s fleet in 2023.

Speaking to Fleet News this year, Allsop discussed the value of entering a fleet management position with no inherent fleet knowledge: “I said it was an advantage. It was a genuine advantage for me to come in knowing what the product needed to do for the business rather than coming from the fleet side.”

Both sessions – scheduled for 1:00pm on their respective days of Fleet and Mobility Live – will focus on how fleets can benefit from transferrable skills that unconventional candidates can bring into their roles, as well as how the position of fleet manager is itself evolving.