Inside View
Gavin Leslie
Contracts Supervisor
Siemens Traffic Controls
How did you come to work for Siemens?
I joined Siemens Traffic Controls in 2003 as a maintenance technician and was recently promoted to contracts supervisor, working out of our depot in Dundee with three other field engineers.
How do you spend your time?
It's my job to help install and maintain traffic signals anywhere from just south of Perth to Inverness in the north of Scotland. We also look after other equipment such as car park guidance signs and larger variable message signs on some of the major trunk roads.
A typical day starts at 8.30am and usually finishes at 5pm, but I'm regularly on standby at weekends in case we need to fix faults or work on traffic signals before the working week begins. Because of the size of our patch I'm never usually in the same place twice, unless there's a particularly tricky fault that can't be fixed in one day.
What’s challenging about your job?
There's not a lot I'd want to change about my role, if I'm honest. It has its testing days, but what job doesn't? I'm spending more time in the office since I was promoted but I think that comes with the territory as you move further up the ladder. I wouldn't want to lose touch with the field work altogether, though. It's important to stay abreast of developments in technology and understand what the guys out there are doing.
And what do you enjoy about it?
Solving problems, especially when you're working on them on your own and think you've exhausted every possibility. Two faults are rarely the same, so you almost need to be able to train yourself on certain occasions, but learning new things that I can share with my colleagues is very satisfying.