John Adams

My name is John Adams, I live in Manchester just outside of Gorton and I'm an auto electrician.

Company I work for, we cover a multitude of different products so we fit tracking systems to anything from a car, van, truck to a piece of plant machinery.

Or it could be an immobiliser or we're also now into aviation so we're doing a lot of tracking systems and cameras for the aviation industry as well.

It changes from day to day to be honest with you.

Some days I'm doing tracking systems on a car or a van or taking them off. The next day I could be fitting an immobiliser to half a million pound piece of plant machinery.

So it changes from one day to the next.

Usually I'll work on my own, depending on the size of the jobs.

We've got a few engineers and we can collaborate together to work on one site to actually get more work done.

But majority of the time it's singular work, working by yourself on a site or in a garage or whichever.

I enjoy the change in different things, what I'm actually doing.

So say one day it's fitting an immobiliser, the next day it's fitting a tracking system.

The next day it could be fitting a larger tracking system, like a fleet management system, which basically coincides with the data of a vehicle. You have to pick up the data wiring.

So it's the change of different things. It's not the same thing every single day. It's a change.

Driving from one location to the next.

I cover approximately about 35 to 40,000 miles a year so I do a lot of driving.

So I think, I suppose, I would say that's the hardest part. That could be very time-consuming.

I started from leaving school not doing what I wanted to do.

Not quite fell into it but knowing that I was good with my hands, I did a 12 week course a long time ago, was called a "man course".

And then found my way into working in a garage, a very large garage in a very large manufacturer of sports car company. I was very lucky in that way and that's where I first started.

Yeah, I was lucky that way. I enjoyed the stuff, I enjoyed working with my hands and just everything fell into place.

So basically I started off fitting radio systems into cars. From there I trained to be an auto electrician which took two and a half years. It was an accelerated course.

So I trained to be an auto electrician to basically work out and rebuild alternators and starter motors, and fault- diagnose vehicles. From there specialising in alarm systems as they were then and immobilisers.

Working for myself for approximately 15 years as well. So I've worked for numerous companies and also worked for myself and then gone back to a company after that.

That's a very good question. It gave me, I suppose, a grounding.

But from when I left school to what I do now, I've learned a lot more from being... I suppose people say I've got a lot of common sense and hands-on experience and you learn things from other people.

So I've really gained an awful lot from after school, from the people around me and gone from there onwards.

Of course I went back to college and had to do more teaching but it was, I suppose, it was something I knew in the end would give me a good career.

I worked for Porsche so I was very lucky when I was younger.

The sports cars at the time there were like Lamborghini Countach, Porsche 911 Turbo, Ferrari 308s and stuff like that. So I was very lucky that I worked on some of the best cars at that time and I was very, very lucky to work for a long period of time.

In fact several times I worked for them. I worked for the import centre for approximately 8, 9 years and I worked for one of the garages for nearly 2 years. So I was very lucky, very lucky.

Take in as much information from school as you possibly can.

You never stop learning. I will say this, you will never stop learning all the way through.

There is always something you will learn every day, you'll be surprised.

You will learn something new and store it as best you can because you never know when that information can come back and help you.

Try as hard as you can because at school you'll never have that time again and it's hard for anybody to say, yeah, it's nice and easy.

It's not, nothing's ever easy, but being at school, learn as much as you possibly can, enjoy it, and try and keep the information you're actually gaining, because it will help you in later life.