The heart of the discerning acquires knowledge,
Proverbs 18:15 (NIV)
for the ears of the wise seek it out.
So it was time to move on from academia into the world of business. Since I had been sponsored by ICL and spent a year working for them, I had assumed that if I wanted it, a job would be waiting for me. As it turned out I was automatically accepted onto the ICL Graduate employee scheme. What I didn’t know at the time is that there was quite some heated debate as to whether I would be subjected to a “selection centre” with other candidates. The contrary argument (which won) was that they were unlikely to discover in a day log session, anything they didn’t know about me from a whole year of work experience.
In some respects, joining ICL as a full-time fully-fledged employee didn’t feel like starting a new job, because I had spent a year working in the Wakefield office and it started with me picking up the job where I left off.
The difference is that now I was on the Graduate programme and expectations were different. This was a way the company employed the leaders of the future. Fresh young things who could be moulded into the corporate culture and in a few years, may well be running the company itself.
As the first step of this process, I was sent to attend a 10-week induction course called the Staff Development Programme 1 (SDP1).
The ICL Training Centre at Beaumont was a magnificent venue. It was a former public school, situated in the extremely prestigious location of Old Windsor in the Royal County of Berkshire. The estate is adjacent to Runnymede, the location where the Magna Carta was signed and of course near Windsor itself, including Windsor Castle, the home of kings and queens through the ages.
The house itself was beautiful and was set up to be ICL’s training centre for customers and staff. Then, it had only a few residential rooms so for the duration, we were all put up in the Skyway Hotel near Heathrow Airport. Today, the property has been extensively upgraded to form the De Vere, Beaumont Estate Hotel and if you want to get a feel for how beautiful the place it, simply visit the De Vere web site.
Then, Beaumont had an excellent restaurant for attendees, so we were spared the fate of living off hotel food for 10 weeks.
What do you do in a training course lasting 10 weeks? It’s a good question and to be honest, after 40 years, it’s a bit hazy. We had an introduction to the company and its structure (it had recently been restructured) and I do remember one of the first bits we did was learn about ICLs latest ground-braking product line, the DRS20 (Distributed Resource System).
This was unlike any other computer system around at the time and I think it was well ahead of its time. Rather than have a central mainframe or mini-computer with a network of terminals, every “workstation” on the DRS20 was a computer in its own right. Each could have resources, such as disks and printers and all the workstations in the network could share those resources. Hence the term “Distributed Resource System. Each workstation had to be set up so every computer knew where everything else was and we learned in detail how to do this, presumably on the premise that at least you could give these grads something money earning to do by configuring DRS20s.
At the time, there still wasn’t much in the way of packaged software available and I think the idea was that customers would write their business applications using a software language like COBOL and PASCAL. However, there was a neat word processor package called DTM (Distributed Text Manager). I would consider that the DRS20 series was ICL’s first “Office System” (i.e. one that could do office tasks such as manage and print documents for managers, secretaries and general office workers). The DRS20 computers were connected together using a single cable which would run round the office, connecting the computers together. I recall that the transfer speed of the network was 2Mbps.
Given my computer science background, I found the configuration of the DRS20s quite a simple task, but it wasn’t quite so simple for my colleagues. What I realised is that the graduate recruitment campaign wasn’t looking for those from a computing or engineering background, but those with the “softer” managerial and sales skills. It effectively didn’t matter what your degree was, so long as you were made of the “right stuff”. The right stuff in this case was to have what it took to be the company directors of the future; that sort of mentality where you know what you want and what you have to do to get it. Even though in many respects I was a fish out of water, I got on well enough in the group and had the advantage that technically, I could more than hold my own.
After 10 weeks of a routine that involved travelling down to Heathrow every Sunday evening, spending a week being ferried daily between the hotel and Beaumont finally to return home late on Friday, we all got a little bit “stir-crazy”. We did get talked to about being a bit disruptive but 10 weeks on that kind of a course is definitely a bit extreme and we were all relieved when we returned to our respective full-time locations.
This wasn’t the end of the Graduate Training Programme however and there were a number of follow up courses to further develop our skills. In those days, residential courses, where you stayed away in a hotel for say, a week, was quite common. Since there were no mobile phones or email, you could completely immerse yourself in the subject matter of the course being effectively, uncontactable. I can’t help wondering if that was a better way to learn new skills rather than the modern custom, of sitting in front of a laptop for an hour long e-learning course, amidst the distractions of the office or home.
Richard Mann 