Mandeville, Manchester- An agriculturist and environmentalist by training, 28 year -old Esther Lyle’s passion for her areas of study can easily be spotted.

However, when a door of opportunity opened to work as Human Resource and Marketing Manager at Sunshine Auto Parts on her job hunting journey in 2008, she grabbed it with both hands and worked to make her mark.

Admittedly, except for a stint as an “all rounder” in a wholesale and money transfer company owned by a family member in Nain, St Elizabeth she had no business experience and no prior knowledge of the auto parts industry.

Today she heads the two year-old Mandeville branch of Sunshine Auto Parts.

It’s a role Lyle said she was given after almost a year of being made redundant from the company’s Kingston headquarters.

“I didn’t have to re-apply for this new job,” she said.

Lyle credits the elevation to her current position to her own willingness to learn and the support of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Sunshine Auto Parts Errol Brennan and other members of his team.

“I have never limited myself…. I was never at all scared or daunted when I applied to Sunshine without (the specific qualifications),” she said.

“Mr Brennan encouraged me to read books and attend workshops. I was taken under his wing and exposed to the world of business. The workshops opened my eyes on how to market the company,” she added.

She speaks with pride of her initiative – while employed at the head office in Kingston – to spearhead a charge for Sunshine Auto parts to be the first such store to have an HIV workplace policy.

She started her new job in Mandeville in the midst of a Bachelor of Science degree in Environmental Studies which she started at the Knox Community College after being laid off from her job in Kingston.

She began by assisting in the selection of sites for the Mandeville branch which was eventually established in April 2011.

Taking on the new role while completing the degree, meant that she had to find time to travel to the May Pen campus of the Knox Community College for classes three full days per week.

Lyle said that she graduated with upper second class honours in 2012 though she missed several sessions of class.

“I don’t see anything harder than working and studying,” said Lyle, “I hardly ever went to classes”.

Though the office is located at James Warehouse Plaza off South Race Course Road in Mandeville, Lyle and her second in command, Lennox Willis and junior assistant Andre Powell are required to engage clients and prospective clients across Manchester , St Elizabeth and Clarendon.

Lyle is accustomed to weighty responsibilities. Following her graduation at Hampton School (for girls) at sixteen years old, she completed her Associate degree at the College of Agriculture Science and Education (CASE) in Portland where she had to make her own decisions and ensured that everything was done “on time and in order.”

Fresh out of CASE at 18 years-old, she taught agricultural science at Christiana High and a bit later science at the now defunct Caribbean Centre for Change which was a reform school in St Elizabeth for children from the United States .

Lyle has an over 30-year platform of experience from which to work as Brennan and his wife Paulette both St Elizabeth natives started Sunshine Auto Parts in 1982.

“The expertise and the quality service that Sunshine offers are second to none in any part of Jamaica . We have invested quite a bit in the form of technology to better serve our customers,” boasts Lyle.

She said the Kingston-based Sunshine Auto realised there was a market to be filled in central Jamaica because persons would travel even from deep rural parts to access the Isuzu, Toyota , Mitsubishi and Lexus parts.

That realisation triggered the decision to open a branch in Mandeville which cemented its place with an official launch in April.

Lyle concedes that she has a preference for agriculture having grown up on a farm. She now has her own farm in her native Southfield St Elizabeth and is convinced that agriculture is one area that will allow for growth of the Jamaican economy.

However, she is also committed to playing her part in the further growth of Sunshine Auto.

“If it’s the lord’s will I could be here (at Sunshine Auto) for the next ten years. We are hoping that within the next year, year and a half we will be fully settled in Mandeville. We have seen some growth and we hope to take it further,” she said.