At school, I wasn’t exactly a model student. The curriculum bored me, and nothing really stuck. I barely paid attention and left with hardly any qualifications to my name.
But there was one week that stood out. A short apprenticeship at a firm called Desktop Engineers (DTE). It was a week of fixing hardware, mostly soldering PCBs to repair them. Back then, CRT monitors held a dangerous charge even when unplugged—I learned that the hard way when I nearly electrocuted myself.
Then school ended, and reality hit. I had no plan. No direction. Panic set in.
I racked my brain for anything I’d enjoyed, and DTE came to mind. That led me to apply for an IT course at a local college. It wasn’t prestigious; in fact, they took pretty much anyone. The only catch? I had to be in the right catchment area. So, at 16, I used the address of one of my dad’s friends—without telling him. That got awkward when he started receiving mail addressed to me.
The college wasn’t groundbreaking, but it taught the basics: how computers worked, operating systems, some PCB knowledge, and good old Microsoft Word. After six months, I landed an apprenticeship at the local council’s desktop stores.
At first, I had no clue what I was doing—I just followed instructions. The job involved preparing new PCs, installing an image (the operating system), and setting them up for staff. Back then, we used an application called ARJ to deploy images, but later switched to GHOST, and eventually PXE booting, which was a game changer compared to the old floppy disk method.
Curiosity drove me forward. I kept asking questions, learning, and getting more involved. Within a year, I wasn’t just following instructions—I was helping shape the build process. I moved from apprentice to full-time trainee desktop engineer, rolling out PCs across the organization. Laptops were rare and expensive back then, mostly reserved for execs.
The technical side came naturally, and I passed several Microsoft operating system exams. Before I knew it, I jumped from apprentice to senior engineer, skipping a step. The transition wasn’t difficult technically—but leading a team was a whole different challenge. I was 19 or 20, suddenly managing people twice my age, some of whom had applied for the same promotion. That was… interesting.
I kept learning, but I hit a glass ceiling. The tech made sense, but the decisions made by the organization didn’t. As a desktop engineer, I interacted with everyone—I knew what software they used, what frustrated them, what worked, and what didn’t. Yet I couldn’t understand why management made the choices they did.
At the time, I had no clue about strategic management. I was just frustrated. Career progression in the public sector was slow—dead man’s shoes, as they say.
Then, a project manager named Adrian took me under his wing. He saw potential and pushed me toward a Diploma in Management Studies (DMS). That’s when I hit a real challenge. School had left me with little academic confidence—reading was fine, but writing? That was a struggle.
But I pushed through. And in the process, I didn’t just learn management—I learned to write.