What I do

The company I work for makes electric batteries for companies like Nissan. I work in the clean room where the cell (the part which supplies electrical current) is manufactured for the Nissan Leaf electric car. I look after the whole process, so if there are any breakdowns on the production line, any plant maintenance or any engineering requests if something isn’t coming out correctly, I am one of the team that sorts it out.

How I became a technician

In year 10 at school, someone came in from Rolls Royce to talk about what they do, and I found it fascinating. But someone said “Oh you’re a girl, what are you doing here?” so it knocked my confidence. When I left school, I was unsure what I wanted to do, so I did some sixth form, but I also enrolled at college to do a Pre-Apprenticeship Introduction to Engineering scheme, where you would do a block at college and then a block at a training school. I quickly realised sixth form wasn’t for me and college was a good transition from school into work.

I then got an apprenticeship through Procter & Gamble, who made perfume at the time. I did six months and then they announced they were closing down. From there, I applied to other apprenticeships, and I got one with Nissan. In the second year, you get to pick where you want to work, and I chose batteries. In my third year, the battery bank got taken over and we are no longer Nissan, so the last years of my apprenticeship have been with Envision, the leading battery manufacturer in the UK.

A typical day in my
working life

The batteries we make go into the Nissan Leaf or the electric Nissan van e-NV200. A small percentage of the batteries go to third parties, including Hitachi, and some go into static storage. Day-to-day, if the machine breaks down or if there is a quality issue, such as an indent on one of the sheets, we trace the fault back and sort it out. That could involve changing a component that might be damaged or faulty. Some fixes take minutes or it might be a three to four-hour job, if a robot has crashed, for instance. Some of the work is quite physical, as we might have to go inside the line or even work on top of it if we have to rewire a robot. In total, there are 28 different lines doing different tasks.

On one line, for instance, there are about six multi-access robots, 15 linear robots and a lot of pneumatics as well. If you watch it in action, it is really overwhelming. We write up every job we do at the end of each day. That gives accountability for the job you’ve done and also acts as an historical record. It is handed on to the next shift to flag things up. For the last three years, I have done shift work of 12-hour shifts of two days, two nights, then four days off. I also come in one day a week to do my apprenticeship work.

Don’t be put off by the process of being an apprentice. It can sound daunting, but it isn’t and there are no exams like in university.

If something breaks down or isn’t right, your brain starts ticking and you go through the process of what could be wrong. I like the satisfaction of knowing I’ve fixed it.

A little more about
my everyday role

What I wear to work

Because the clean room is such a controlled environment, you are not allowed any moisture or contamination, so I wear a clean room suit. Everything is covered and only your eyes show. You have to go through an air shower once you have been gowned, and you spend the duration of your shift in the full kit. You can wear ear defenders if you want to, but the noise is under the legal limit, so you don’t have to.

The most exciting thing I’ve achieved so far in my job

I did a modification on one of the lines, which I am proud of. We have equipment that cuts the metal sheets, called a die, and we were getting a lot of issues. I tapped into the pneumatic system and added a pressure switch on both sides, so when it cuts, it will show you the live pressure. If a set point isn’t reached, it will signal that. Instead of changing the die all the time, I then put a fault code on the screen, so when the switch doesn’t reach its set point, there will be a fault that flags up and it will say check your booster pressure. If you cannot increase the booster any further, then it would be a quick five-minute fix. It was a simple thing, and we have saved lots of time. It has been rolled out on eight lines and every time the fault pops up, I think, I designed that!

The next steps in my career journey

For the next few years I want to be a technician and develop a better understanding of everything and move around within the plant. After that, I would like to be a team leader. We have recently taken on some new trainees, so that will be a new skill for me because I will be teaching them.

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