Graham Turner
Grass is ‘greener’ after redundancy for Graham
For 30 years Graham Turner had it good, with well-paid jobs close to home.
But that ended abruptly with redundancy and instead of moping around, Graham, 49, from Sible Hedingham, Essex, saw the chance to do something for himself and enter a growing industry.
Just a few months later, Graham is at the cutting-edge of plumbing thanks to the green plumbing course he completed with New Career Skills, which helps career-changers trainfor and findjobs as plumbers, electricians and renewable energy engineers.
And with a government scheme to pay people back for generating energy through green technology getting underway on April 1, he is ahead of the game.
Graham said: “I was a mechanical and production engineer for 30 years and I had spent all my life working in heavy industry. My last position was as a manager for a large commercial vehicle manufacturer making car transporters.
“With the downturn in the motor industry, orders for car transporters were down and many of us were made redundant. It was the push I needed to go out and do something on my own.”
Graham said it was “hard to think outside the box” when in a comfortable, well-paid job. On being made redundant, he had to make a choice and used some of his redundancy payment to study plumbing at New Career Skills, with an extension into green plumbing, which covers areas such as fitting solar hot water systems and ground and air source heat pumps.
Graham added: “There were certain aspects of the courses, because of my background, that I found easy, but there were still a lot of things I learnt. The courses are structured really well and the tutors were brilliant.”
Now self employed, Graham has teamed up with plumbers certified in gas and oil servicing and can now offer complete solutions to heating and hot water problems, as well as renewable energy installations.
On April 1 a government scheme launches that will reward those investing in renewable energy technologies by paying them for the energy they generate and feed into the National Grid. Thanks to his own foresight and New Career Skills, Graham will be one of the first businessmen able to offer customers a straightforward route to the scheme, putting him ahead of his competitors.
Graham said: “Over the next three or four years any government incentives will be snapped up. Hopefully we’re going to be really busy.”
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