Engineer
Gibsons Food

John C

00:00:02 My name is John C, I work at Gibson’s Foods and I’m maintenance engineer and supervisor. Day to day my job is to first of all keep an eye on all the machinery and to react to any problems, any breakdowns. Also, I look after the whole site regards to the building materials themselves.

00:00:22 My interests in school believe it or not weren’t actually school related. I never showed an interest in school work particularly. Basically I was just looking forward to getting out of there and doing things outside of school such as I used to play around with motorcycles quite a lot, which I still do. I was very head strong before I left school and I’d made up my mind probably the year before I left that I was going to leave straight away. I think the reason why I decided to leave rather than go through sixth form was money and just to keep up with my friends who were working and freedom, yeah.

00:01:01 I don’t think I had a plan of life. I just muddled on through and let circumstances dictate where it lead me. My first job when I left school was actually working on a poultry farm which I did for a couple of months. It was quite a messy job and I didn’t particularly enjoy it. It was just for the money, basically. My friends at the time probably were on a considerable amount of money more than me because I was always looking for jobs that paid more and just through the Job Centre I found another job which was working in a factory. I started just on the processors, a sort of machine operator. There was the chances to carry out a bit of routine maintenance on the machinery and I think that might have sparked my interest in machinery but, like I said before, I had a mechanical bias just form working on motorcycles and cars. Just gradually through working on machinery in the factory I found myself being handed more and more maintenance to be done.

00:02:03 I worked in the factory for four years and unfortunately, eventually the company that I worked for went bust and I was made redundant. I spent a short time on the dole. I put my details with a temping agency and I got myself a job in a paper mill where I found the money was extremely well, I was probably on four or five times the salary of my friends and they were very, very good times. The job there lasted for almost four years, I think, on and off. I was only temporary there unfortunately, and they lost a contract and then I unfortunately found myself back on the dole again. It’s not very nice being unemployed. I never found it very nice being unemployed. I did everything I could to get a job as quick as possible, to be honest.

00:02:51 A friend of mine owned an engineering company and I approached him for a job and he knew from my past my mechanical abilities with vehicles, motorcycles because also he was, that was one of his hobbies as well. And he took me on on a temporary basis and I was originally was going to be a welder fabricator and I think the way I ended up here was there was a guy that was off sick and they put me in here two weeks and I seemed to get on very well and I never looked back.

00:03:23 I think my biggest hobby outside of work is actually scuba diving. I’ve just recently come back from Scotland and I’ve been to Egypt twice this year. One of my ambitions would be to train people to scuba dive. The club that I’m a part of at the moment a lot of people put their time in for free and it’s nice to pay them back by also putting my time in for free and to carry on the club by bringing new recruits in and training them.

00:03:49 If I had my time over and I was going to do it again I would definitely look for further education, sixth form, college. I’m quite happy with where I’m at now but I think I could’ve been here a lot earlier. ENDS