If someone asked me ‘Ashley, what got you in to the security industry?’, my short answer would be ‘with a bit of luck’ ….. but there is a little more to it.
So begins Ashley Watson in his telling of his security career so far – it’s a story of progression, and of how one thing can lead to another. While not wanting to give away all Ashley’s story, he is now the EMEA Security and Risk Manager at Refinitiv, a financial markets data company; to be exact, he works for CBRE, dedicated to the Refinitiv account. As a Security Institute member he is part of the Institute’s ‘Next Generation’ voluntary work to show security as a possible career for teens. More on that in the next couple of editions, the May and June issues, of Professional Security magazine.
His story begins:
I have always been interested in electronics and techy stuff and I enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together, much to the annoyance of my parents in my ‘youth’. During my time at school (back in the 1990s) I wasn’t too sure what I wanted to do as a career, my dream was to be a professional cricket player. During the last year of secondary school, everyone in their final year would sit with a careers advisors and then participate doing work experience for two weeks, each pupil would go through a series of questions with an assessment.
After going through one of their assessments, the top three careers suggestions for me were i) florist, ii) undertaker, iii) electrician. The third was the most appealing to be honest. I can’t remember the questions asked and what I answered with, but I would love to see what they were. I can see the logic between a florist and undertaker, but I can’t see how my answers would have suggested those two and being an electrician.
Work experience
I entered the two-week work experience as an ‘electrician’ and enjoyed every minute of it, even if it was making the teas, running to the café to get sandwiches, cleaning the floor, getting wrapped in bubble-wrap, running to the van to get equipment etc. It was good fun and this has ultimately put me in the direction of where I am. After leaving secondary school, I enrolled at college on the Electrical Installations Part 1 and later I enrolled on the Part 2 courses, around this point I knew my dream of becoming a professional cricketer was fading, not because of the studying, I just wasn’t very good.
Continued in the April 2020 print issue of Professional Security, which you can freely read on the ‘magazine‘ part of the website.
