00:00:02 My name’s Dougie Weir, I’m a Solutions Sales Manager at NVT group.
00:00:09 As it suggests I’m on the sales side the solutions part of it really brings in the technical knowledge that I’ve built up over the years.
00:00:17 I come from a technical background, I’m a Microsoft certified engineer and have been for ten years now, and over two or three different versions of Microsoft Windows.
00:00:28 Well you’ve got to keep yourself up to date with all the technologies that are coming out and the technologies that are coming out are very quick.
00:00:36 As I started my career I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna do, moving from college I went into electronic engineering at college. Basically because I was quite good at physics and maths at school and it was a kind of natural progression to move on with these subjects. My father he’s a civil engineer so he’s a kind of, you know a mathematical kind of guy as well, so I probably got that from him.
00:01:05 I suppose I was kind of coerced into college through my father, who’d you know at that time I guess I would have turned round and said oh I’ll just go out for a job now, but my sister she had been to university so, it was just natural for me to say, well I’ll go into further education, pick, pick something that you, you feel you’re interested in and go for that you know.
00:01:27 I left college, one of my friends who, who’d done a similar track at college, had a job down at IBM so I ended up down in IBM which until recently it was fixing product which was built not working, and we’d pinpoint the error, fix that and then it would be sent out.
00:01:54 It gave me a real good grounding on how you know technology how PCs the actual workings of PCs and that really sort of, from there it was just natural progression to move from PCs then move onto sort of networking.
00:02:09 Technology’s just moving so fast, that you know you’ve got, you’ve got to study, so it’s a good thing for your, you know your, yourself to learn more and more if you’re not learning you do tend to get into a comfort zone and you know you get, you could sit there for a few years in the same job and it just goes by you.
00:02:29 I then decided well I’m doing shift work, I want a nine to five job, this really isn’t what I want to do, and it was quite, I suppose it was quite fortunate was, I was kind of pushed more than anything given the, the fact I was a contractor and IBM decided they don’t want any more contractors, so just apply for your job and you’ll get a job at IBM. It was at that point I said, well I’m not gonna apply because I’m gonna change, because if I apply now I’ll maybe end up here the rest of my life.
00:02:59 Used to work with a company that looked after insurance brokers, that was a good job, that was a job that I looked after Scotland, it was an English based company and it was myself and another engineer looked after Scotland and I would work possibly on average something like four hours a day. Which sounds magic, sounds great but it’s, it begins to get a bit boring, repetitive and that was a turning point for me, to say, I don’t know I want to do something different.
00:03:29 You know moving all the way up through the company to where I’ve got to now and crossed over from departments I’m now looking at well, what’s, what’s next, the next is probably moving up to although I, I would like to perceive I, I do help to run the company, probably again a wee bit higher now, and getting a wee bit more say, in how the company is run.
00:03:52 But you have to, you have to make money in this world and if you don’t make money you know you’re gonna end up basically having no, no life, no holidays, no nice cars, nice houses, that sort of thing you know.
00:04:09 END
Dougie Weir
Dougie Weir
My name’s Dougie Weir, I’m a Solutions Sales Manager at NVT group.
As it suggests I’m on the sales side the solutions part of it really brings in the technical knowledge that I’ve built up over the years.
I come from a technical background, I’m a Microsoft certified engineer and have been for ten years now, and over two or three different versions of Microsoft Windows.
Well you’ve got to keep yourself up to date with all the technologies that are coming out and the technologies that are coming out are very quick.
As I started my career I wasn’t quite sure what I was gonna do, moving from college I went into electronic engineering at college. Basically because I was quite good at physics and maths at school and it was a kind of natural progression to move on with these subjects. My father he’s a civil engineer so he’s a kind of, you know a mathematical kind of guy as well, so I probably got that from him.
I suppose I was kind of coerced into college through my father, who’d you know at that time I guess I would have turned round and said oh I’ll just go out for a job now, but my sister she had been to university so, it was just natural for me to say, well I’ll go into further education, pick, pick something that you, you feel you’re interested in and go for that you know.
I left college, one of my friends who, who’d done a similar track at college, had a job down at IBM so I ended up down in IBM which until recently it was fixing product which was built not working, and we’d pinpoint the error, fix that and then it would be sent out.
It gave me a real good grounding on how you know technology how PCs the actual workings of PCs and that really sort of, from there it was just natural progression to move from PCs then move onto sort of networking.
Technology’s just moving so fast, that you know you’ve got, you’ve got to study, so it’s a good thing for your, you know your, yourself to learn more and more if you’re not learning you do tend to get into a comfort zone and you know you get, you could sit there for a few years in the same job and it just goes by you.
I then decided well I’m doing shift work, I want a nine to five job, this really isn’t what I want to do, and it was quite, I suppose it was quite fortunate was, I was kind of pushed more than anything given the, the fact I was a contractor and IBM decided they don’t want any more contractors, so just apply for your job and you’ll get a job at IBM. It was at that point I said, well I’m not gonna apply because I’m gonna change, because if I apply now I’ll maybe end up here the rest of my life.
Used to work with a company that looked after insurance brokers, that was a good job, that was a job that I looked after Scotland, it was an English based company and it was myself and another engineer looked after Scotland and I would work possibly on average something like four hours a day. Which sounds magic, sounds great but it’s, it begins to get a bit boring, repetitive and that was a turning point for me, to say, I don’t know I want to do something different.
You know moving all the way up through the company to where I’ve got to now and crossed over from departments I’m now looking at well, what’s, what’s next, the next is probably moving up to although I, I would like to perceive I, I do help to run the company, probably again a wee bit higher now, and getting a wee bit more say, in how the company is run.
But you have to, you have to make money in this world and if you don’t make money you know you’re gonna end up basically having no, no life, no holidays, no nice cars, nice houses, that sort of thing you know.
END
Dougie Weir is Sales Manager for NVT Group. He arrived here by the technical route. He had a job at IBM fixing new computers that didn't work. He was a contractor there, and when IBM decided they wanted employees rather than contractors he decided to move on.
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