I joined the RAF straight from school fulfilling my ambition to join this service in the role of my choice. After completing my training at No1 Radio School, RAF Locking, I was promoted and posted to a number of units in order to gain operational experience. My last resident posting was in 1992 as a member of the Ground Electronics Installation Squadron based in Bedfordshire. This unit was responsible for the building, Installation and commissioning of all ground based electronic equipment employed by the British forces worldwide. This was an incredibly rewarding role that required technical skills to be of the highest order and allowed me to train on a variety of electronic equipment from telephone and IT systems through to radar and complex communications systems. During my time with this unit I also attended courses in the installation of structured cabling, Fibre optics, Working at Heights and soldering to NASA standards

Here I was employed on contract as one of a team of five consultants from various disciplines, tasked with the upgrade of the entire IT infrastructure of Strathclyde Fire & Rescue Service, the second largest fire service in the country.
My particular area of specialisation was the area of hardware with my primary responsibility being the Data Centre, consisting of some 280 plus servers and associated storage, network and security equipment.
My role here has been to take the hardware phase of this project from concept, design and planning, installation of the physical hardware, Installation and configuration of management tools and OS configuration and documentation, reporting to the client with regular progress presentations and reports. Particular skills included HP SIM, HP RDP with multi site connectivity via RILOE.
This has been a very rewarding and interesting phase of my career, allowing me to learn new skills whilst putting my existing skills to test within a demanding and highly disciplined environment.

I was employed with Computerland UK at their Nottingham Head office.
Here my major responsibility involved the supervisory management of a team of Technical Specialists involved in the screening and call progression of all hardware and software related calls logged by contracted clients and the support of our field based engineering force. As part of my role I was required to act as first point of escalation for problem issues and to take the role of problem manager for protracted and SLA critical incidents. This role routinely required ‘Hand’s on’ involvement with escalated issues and in depth research and liaison with other internal departments, equipment manufactures and third party contractors often on customers sites, in order to formulate solutions to customer issues. Site visits in support of field engineers requiring specialist assistance were also a regular occurrence

I joined Fujitsu from Unisys as the result of a contract acquisition and transferred as part of that agreement as I was one of the two ‘experts’ in this area. Initially employed as a Field Service Engineer with my primary focus being the newly acquired contract, my role then became that of a Field based trainer eventually leading to the role of Field Based Team Leader of the midlands region with a large amount of role out and project based tasks involving EPOS, Desktop and Servers. Eventually I was asked to move to the Support department at Fujitsu’s technical centre in Stevenage and did this for sometime gaining valuable experience before seeking a move nearer to home which I took with Computerland UK.

Having recently left the armed forces, I was employed by Unisys in a Customer Service Engineering role. This role involved working as a rota based, pro-active engineer dealing with customer issues throughout the UK. This was a varied and interesting position as the equipment and customer base was vast and ranged from fault diagnosis and rectification on anything from EPOS equipment , Desktop PC’s, Laptops and Printers right through to managed networks and Server installations. There was also frequent opportunity to be involved with installation and project work, this is something I was trained for and specialised in during my time with the RAF and I enjoyed putting my skills to use.