I have always wanted to do something technical and involving problem solving, but l I wasn’t really sure what. I didn’t want to stay on for sixth form, as I wanted practical work. My sister did an apprenticeship, and she got on really well, so I decided to follow the same path. Amazon offered this course, and it really appealed to me, so I applied, and I was lucky enough to get it.

At first, I did 10 months of studying at Tameside College in Manchester and then I came back on to site. I am now studying for a HNC and HND in Electrical Engineering and then I plan to do a year at Salford University, taking a degree in Automation and Controls Engineering. I am being supported through all of this by Amazon.

We can deal with anything from 74,000 to 130,000 packages a day, and I am a part of the team supporting that. I work in an office within a big warehouse and my role is to find if there are any issues and identify the cause. I use a lot of software, computers and monitoring systems. One of the key things that I do every day is a daily report. Every morning, I take the data on all the jams and stops we have had through the night, log them and send the details out to the rest of the team. Occasionally, I work on the physical sensors and run resets, but most of what I do is the programming behind making things run.

All Amazon’s parcel tracking is done using barcodes, which are scanned multiple times so you can see where in the site things are at any moment in time. If something is full or jammed and we don’t stop production and clear it promptly, it could cause damage to other parcels or to our equipment, so what we do is vital to keep things moving. When a customer gets an email saying their parcel is going to be late, it’s because it has not left the site by the time it should have.