Warrant Officer, Richard Allen
“I decided I wanted to come out of electronics and thought that both job opportunities and the quality of life were better in the Highlands than in the South.”
A career spanning 37 years in the RAF as an electronics engineer with management responsibility for a 57-strong team, led to a new role for Richard Allen as Quality, Training, Safety and HR Manager for McPherson Ltd, a road haulage company specialising in bulk whisky movements. He worked for an oil company and as a consultant before settling with his current employer, where he’s been for eight years.
“The man management skills I acquired in the RAF, together with knowledge of quality assurance and health and safety, which were all part of my service career work, were all valuable when it came to landing a civilian job.”
Richard feels that the most difficult thing about the change in career was the loss of stability of employment, but that has come right in the end. For RAF leavers today, he has a word of advice: “The hardest thing for civilian employers to understand is service technology – we all tend to write our CVs in service jargon, which nobody outside can understand! I had to learn to describe myself as an electronics technician rather than an avionics technician, so that employers could see what experience I had.”