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Adrian Murphy

Adrian Murphy

My name is Adrian Murphy, I'm forty-five. I'm a customer service advisor supervisor for PPG. I manage a small team of people - eight people - responsible for helping out our customers, in effect. We manufacture automotive coatings for the refinish market. I've been with PPG for twenty-three years now, but I've probably had about six or seven different jobs within that space of time, so it hasn't been too boring and I've had lots of change within my career.

00:00:34 Yes, I first joined as a lab technician in their research department, and that was working on developing a new type of paint, a water-based gloss paint at the time. I then moved up to Stowmarket in their pigments laboratories, doing some pigment testing. That was really interesting; however, after a few years I started to get a little bit bored with it, so when the customer services department was first set up I then got a job in there. My first job in customer services was answering telephones, so answering customer calls.

00:01:08 It sounds fairly tedious, but actually it wasn't. I really enjoyed it. Yes, when I made that career change it was a bit of a surprise to a few people for spending all my time in a science background, having an obvious interest in sciences, then to moving away from that entirely. So it was a bit of a surprise. I think when people saw how much I was enjoying the job, you know, they said 'fine.' I wanted to be a road digger. That's what I grew up in. My bedroom was overlooking a very busy road, and I remember all the time I thought it was being dug up, and all I could see in those days were these guys in their little stripy red little tents drinking tea out of a thermos flask and dealing with really noisy bits of equipment, and that really seemed like a really cool job at the time.

00:01:54 So I suppose that was at the age of about eight or nine. That was what I wanted to be - a road digger. My A level subjects were chemistry, and biology, and maths, so it was about understanding the world around me and how it's made up, you know, what compounds were made to make up this hat here and this paper, you know. That was the real thing that really interested me. Did I have a career in mind? You know, was I going to become this mad professor type? No, I didn't. Did I want a specific branch of chemistry or science? No, not really. So it was quite general really.

00:02:25 I left school, went to university to do some chemistry, probably one of the biggest jumps in my life. You're suddenly thrust out much more on your own. You suddenly have to become much more dependent on yourself, but great fun and I'd recommend it to anybody, really, to go to spend some time at university. Most of my days were filled with lectures, whereas a lot of my friends at university who were doing perhaps English and history were only doing a couple of hours a day, so I felt a bit jealous of that.

00:02:57 Having a family was a really big change. Huge responsibility suddenly having a small little thing to look after, to ensure there's a house for they to live in, and to provide for them. It was a huge responsibility. So, yes, that was an amazing change, an amazing change in my life. You know, in the environment that we all live in at the moment you have to be flexible and be ready for change, so, yes, I'm more expecting to make some sort of change. Whether that's totally outside customer service or not, I don't know, but one thing's for sure there will be change. So it's about being ready for that, and looking forward to it, and just building up the skills that allows you to have that change and flexibility.

00:03:41 What that change is, I've no idea. Ends