In 2009, Jo won the inaugural ICB Tutor of the Year award — the first time the category had ever been given. She has been shortlisted in 2023, 2024 and 2025 — three consecutive years — since joining Training Link. In 2023 she was also awarded the ICB Companionship — the institute’s highest individual honour.

“It’s only money when it goes missing. Before that it’s just numbers and paper.”

Jo’s philosophy about payroll education is clear and uncompromising. She believes that teaching software without first teaching the manual foundations produces data entry clerks, not payroll professionals.

“If the computer breaks, or a figure looks wrong, and you don’t understand how the software got to that number — you can’t fix it. You can’t even spot it.”

That conviction shapes every part of the Training Link ICB Payroll course. Students work through nineteen manual assessments before they touch any software — building a genuine understanding of PAYE, National Insurance, statutory payments, RTI, and CIS. Only then do they move to BrightPay, for the computerised section. Jo is an enthusiastic advocate for the software.

“Once you’ve learned the principles, the software almost doesn’t matter. They’re all doing the same job.”

The ICB Level 3 Diploma in Payroll Management is not a tick-box qualification. Jo is direct about what it signals to an employer or client.

“The ICB exam has a manual section and a computerised section. So you are not just testing the software — there are no shortcuts. You still have to have that manual knowledge. It’s a very wide syllabus, and the students who pass have passed to a very high standard — practically as well as theoretically.”

For those looking to go further, the qualification opens the door to ICB payroll agent status — the ability to process payroll professionally for other businesses, either as a sole agent or as a payroll bureau. It is, Jo notes, an increasingly lucrative path.

“A lot of companies don’t want to process their own payroll. They want to know it’s in trusted hands. An ICB-qualified payroll agent has the knowledge and the credibility to provide exactly that.”

Updating the course is a significant undertaking in its own right. Jo begins in April, once the Budget has confirmed the coming year’s figures, and works through every page — updating legislation, recalculating examples, revising assessments, and refilming video tutorials where needed. The videos alone take around two months. In years where the government has made mid-year changes — as happened with National Insurance — the process starts again.

“If they change it, we change it. That’s the job.”

Jo writes everything with the student on day one in mind. No jargon, no assumed knowledge, no shortcuts.

“We were all students once. We know what it’s like to open a book on something you’ve never done before, working on your own, fitting study around a full-time job and a family. Everything we write is built around that person.”

For bookkeepers who already have their own practice, adding payroll is not just a professional development exercise — it is a commercial one. Jo has seen the same pattern repeat itself over the years.

“I’ve had students come back who completed their bookkeeping qualification and said: I’ve had to come back and do payroll because I’m turning work away. Clients want a one-stop shop. They don’t want to go to different people for their bookkeeping and their payroll.”

A payroll qualification makes a bookkeeping practice more attractive to the clients most likely to stay long term — the businesses that want a single, trusted person handling their finances.

Jo’s conviction about the importance of manual foundations is not abstract. She has seen it play out in practice, more than once.

One former student — already working in an accountancy firm — was given responsibility for the payroll on completing his course. He got in touch to say thank you.

“He said: since I’ve done the course, I’ve been able to do a better job at what I was already doing. Since I qualified, I’ve been given more responsibility — my employers trust me with it, because they know I have that additional knowledge and understanding.”

The second message came from a student who had worked in payroll for over 30 years before enrolling. She had done the course for the formal qualification and to get to grips with the software. She passed her exam and wrote to Jo afterwards.

“She said she was embarrassed to recognise how much she didn’t know — even after 30 years of doing it. That’s not a criticism of her. That’s what happens when you’ve been processing payroll without ever having been taught the foundations properly. The course filled in 30 years’ worth of gaps.”

It is perhaps the clearest illustration of why Jo teaches the way she does — and why the manual foundations come first, every time, regardless of how much experience a student arrives with.

She has been working in payroll for over 25 years. It is still her passion.

“If I had to go back out tomorrow and find a job, I’d be looking for a payroll role. It’s what I do.”

Credentials

• ICB Companionship – the highest individual ICB honour (2023)
• ICB Tutor of the Year — Winner 2009 (inaugural award)
• ICB Tutor of the Year — Shortlisted 2023, 2024 and 2025 (three consecutive years)
• Speaker, FAB Conference 2025
• Featured speaker, ICB Bookkeeping Discovery Day, January 2026
• Presenter, ICB’s Business Insight Live Sessions (x2)
• Presenter, ICB’s Self Assessment Tax Live Session (June 2026)
• Over 25 years of payroll experience
• Real-world experience in practice, bureau, and in-house payroll
• Author and updater of the Training Link ICB Payroll course since 2020