Looking at my CV for this period you could be forgiven for thinking that I worked for lots of different organisations. In fact I worked at one place for 10½ years. They just kept re-organising around me!

My first job in the training profession was as an Operator Training Officer at the Rover Company, Solihull which was by that time (1969) a constituent part of the British Leyland Motor Corporation.

Though nominally responsible for introducing systematic training programmes for shop floor employees the job soon evolved into special projects trainer. The first of these was 'metrication' which the Government had stated was to be 75% complete by 1975. You can see how successful that has been!

Next, and more successful because the Government gave a specific date, was 'decimalisation'. When employment legislation started to arrive thick and fast we were kept busy providing training to keep managers and supervisors up to date.

Then the company got the re-organisation 'bug'. Rover, and Triumph in Coventry, merged their management structures and I endured the first of many changes: to Supervisory Training Officer. I was to specialise in the training of office supervisors throughout Rover Triumph. No sooner was my training for this task complete than we were re-organised into 'line and staff' and I was put into the (firing?) line!

There now followed one of the most enjoyable periods of my working life: as the Senior Training Officer for the Engines and Transmissions Plant (Birmingham) of Rover Triumph Limited. That it was so can be attributed to one Tom King, the Plant Personnel Manager, and the best boss I ever had.

In those days, fraught with industrial relations pitfalls, Personnel Managers were the motor industry's equivalent to football managers: they got the blame for everybody else's inadequacies. So, after 3½ years, Tom had to go. This giant was replaced by a dwarf - and I went as soon as I could.

The advantage of a large organisation is that you can usually find a niche somewhere. I found mine as the Management and Supervisory Training Adviser to the Product Engineering Division of Leyland Cars. By this time we had been nationalised!!

After twelve months we were reorganised again and I found myself as a Management Training Adviser at the Management Training Centre, assigned to Jaguar Rover Triumph. Superficially this appeared a super job. Working in a mid-Victorian manor house with views in one direction of sheep and cows and, in the other, of the tiny parish church where John Wesley's grandfather had been baptised. Not a motor car in sight!

But by now I was 40, had been promoted but once in ten years, and the youngsters were being promoted over my head.

It was time to go ...