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| RAIL PROFESSIONAL INTERVIEW
Interview
Andy Knight, Managing Director of Signet Solutions Sam Sherwood-Hale spoke to Andy Knight, Managing Director of Signet Solutions about his experiences as a Signalling Engineer, the skills gap in the rail industry and how Signet Solutions hopes to rectify this very satisfied once this has been completed. I still speak to some of those people today and we often share happy memories of our time together and thankfully these people are in senior roles within the Signal Engineering field. What are some of the biggest changes you’ve seen during that time?
You became Managing Director of Signet Solutions in 2003, and have a near 40-year career as a Signalling Engineer – how did the first half of your career inform your work at Signet Solutions? I had a very traditional route into the Signal Engineering department (called the Signal & Telegraph at my starting point). This allowed me to complete four years of training and placement in the various disciplines in the department whilst also attending a recognised college course in Electrical and Electronic Engineering. This continued throughout my career, and I was lucky enough to be part of an organisation Rail Professional
at the time (British Rail) where I was able to experience a wide range of disciplines and was involved in the installation, testing and maintenance of signalling equipment throughout my early career and ultimately became a fault control supervisor before moving into the training area. Latterly I was leading a maintenance and faulting team in the Manchester Piccadilly area, and this team seemed to become where trainee and graduates would be sent to have an initial introduction to the trackside equipment element of the job. I thoroughly enjoyed this experience and it allowed me to pass on my knowledge and understanding to other people and I felt
I think without a doubt the change of the organisation as it changed from a nationalised industry to a private led organisation was one of the biggest challenges that the industry faced. This impacted every facet of the industry and the ability to communicate and manage projects and perform maintenance was challenged. It also led to challenges in the way we managed and controlled competence and it took the industry some time to assess this and bring in control measures to assure quality. The rules around the safety and management of projects have seen huge changes and I think we are about to see more challenges as we recover from the pandemic and transition to Great British Railways. As always, we have faced a challenge to justify the renewal and expense surrounding new technology and the implementation of the digital railway and we still face a huge task in persuading the government and the public that we should invest in the industry. In my career this has never gone away and in reality, this is an ongoing challenge for our industry. What are some of the challenges you believe the training sector will face in the coming years? How do they compare to the challenges of the past? I think we have had to adapt to the pandemic and implement changes to the way we train people, which is steadily easing, and we are returning to some form of normality. However, as in many other industries we