Restoration and Repair Manager
E.ON

Steve S

0:00:02 My name’s Steve S. I’m the restoration and repairs manager. I’m based at Morgreen Delivery Centre working for Central Networks, which is part of the Eon Group. Our function primarily is to keep the lights on. The area and the regions that we cover are Nottinghamshire, the whole of Nottinghamshire and the whole of Derbyshire. So every customer that’s connected, we have a responsibility to keep their lights on. And when their lights do go out, my team goes out and fixes it and gets people back on as quickly as possible.

00:00:32 In all honestly I wasn’t probably the most academic person while I was at school and my sort of pastimes or the things I enjoyed most at school were sort of physical education, PE, sports, that kind of thing. I left school in 1985 and we had what we called a Youth Training Scheme or the Government had a Youth Training Scheme that was set up there and I went to the Chamber of Commerce, told them that I would like to work with computers and they came up with a placement at what was then EMEB, East Midlands Electricity Board.

00:01:08 A year’s placement which I took on. I was still unsure as what I wanted but I started maturing then and after that first year I was fortunate to get a permanent post. It was probably a couple of years later when I spent some time in the engineering department where I actually decided that’s the career path that I wanted to take. And I thought, ‘yeah, this is the time then. I need to try and get some further qualification under my belt and start being serious about my career path’. And that’s what I did.

00:01:39 I was aware of the people that came onto the YTS, the Youth Training Scheme, before me and there were a number that were sort of overlapping and overtaking and progressing their careers quicker than me and it got to the stage where I thought, ‘oh, I’m not really getting anywhere here’. That was one motivational aspect. Two, I saw what the engineers did. The work looked very interesting and because of those things it was something that I would say appealed to me.

00:02:10 Going back to 2000, the year 2000, we had quite a significant change in the business. I was a third engineer as it was known then and I remember at the time I wanted to be a second engineer and we were all counselled. And on the form, you had to put three choices of what you wanted to do. And I always remember the manager at the time sort of saying to me, ‘you’ve got your third choice. It’s up to you if want to take it but I believe the way the business is shaping up, within the next two or three years, you will be a second engineer as a program manager. Not in the line that you want to but as a program manager, if that’s the route that you wanted to take. And that sort of steered me, you know, on a slightly different career path. A managerial path which has then sort of led me to where I am now ultimately I guess.

00:02:57 At school, I do have regrets. I wish I’d tried harder. If I had tried harder, the work that I have done after school would have…I wouldn’t have needed to have done it. I spent three years at college getting O-levels which, if I’d got my head down at school, I could have saved myself three years of time. But I had to get that in order to get onto the ONC which I wanted to do to become an engineer. So that’s a big regret. At school I could have tried a lot harder and it would have saved me a lot of pain after school.

ENDS