Tim Hughes - Advanced Apprentice, Substations
What do I do? I'm training to maintain and repair any substation equipment.
Well I wanted to be an apprentice electrician at first and tried quite hard to get an apprenticeship there and couldn't really get one so I looked a bit further away, in the engineering field and found National Grid, didn't think I could quite qualify for it but I did and so it all kicked off from there and it's been fantastic ever since.
On a daily basis of the job we start off in the classroom and do all the theory base to the job we're going to be doing, for instance, the compressors. Then we come over here into the workshop, take apart the compressors, do some maintenance on them usually a bit of cleaning, get them going again and then put them back.
My job fits into National Grid as part of MDE which is maintenance delivery electricity and we maintain the delivery equipment in the substations and sometimes in the power stations and I'm hopefully training to be part of that team. I'm working on the compressors, the air compressors, for all our pneumatic systems in the substations. At the moment, we're stripping it down but we'll be putting it back together again, hopefully correctly, as soon as we're done.
in the next two or three years I'll almost certainly still be a craftsperson working for National Grid but in the next 10 years I'll hopefully go through my Authorised Person, Senior Authorised Person and get as far up in National Grid as I possibly can really, it's a fantastic company to work for and I'd like to stay working for them.