Anderson Automation and Controls
I began my electrical apprenticeship in Palmerston North with Anderson Automation and Controls (AAC) in 2018, shortly after leaving university for what suited me better at the time: a practical trade. The three years I spent with the AAC team were incredibly formative, both for my career and for me personally. This small, highly motivated team of electricians taught me skills I still carry today, including customer management, interpersonal skills, and workplace professionalism.
AAC gave me the opportunity to work across Domestic, Commercial, and Industrial sectors, helping me become an open-minded electrician who can face varied challenges with confidence. The work was fast-paced, fault-finding industrial maintenance that often meant overtime and going the extra mile for the customer. My time here covered food packaging line automation and maintenance, quarry equipment maintenance, industrial laundry service maintenance, and servicing "Rolling Brake Machines" used for WoF and CoF checks from New Plymouth to Wellington. By the end of my time at AAC, I was working independently, diagnosing and resolving faults on my own.
The training and support from this team gave me the foundation to enter Master Electricians Apprentice of the Year in 2021, competing against other apprentices in the industrial sector. The competition involved tasks such as cable support system installation, wiring of motor starters, diagnosing faults in AC motors, and PLC programming, all judged and compared against apprentices from other regions across New Zealand. I was fortunate enough to record the highest overall score and was awarded Apprentice of the Year in 2021.
I was also nominated by ETCO for their Apprentice of the Year award, which assessed general performance from a more organisational perspective rather than a purely practical one, reflecting how they oversaw my apprenticeship throughout its duration. I placed second in this competition.
Kiwi Control Systems
I moved to Hamilton in 2021, where I finished my apprenticeship and continued into my trade with Kiwi Control Systems (KCS), a company previously recognised for excellence in their projects. I spent a further three years with KCS, honing my skills in producing top-level work, primarily within the dairy industry, contracting to Fonterra and other businesses.
The move to KCS marked a big shift in working style from AAC. Projects now ran for months, sometimes years, rather than the callouts and scheduled maintenance I was used to. This gave me experience working on long-term projects where the output has to be excellent from start to finish. I developed skills working closely with engineers and project managers across various projects, and built countless control panels and distribution panels for installation in process plants, following strict wiring diagrams and cable layouts for the equipment involved.
The highlights of my time at KCS centre on becoming a more detail-oriented tradesman, always looking for ways to improve and rarely settling for anything less than exceptional where time allowed. A particular highlight was my final project with KCS, where I stepped into a managerial role, leading a team of tradesmen/contractors and coordinating a large-scale electrical installation for a pet food factory's dry ingredient storage and milling automation project. This focused mainly on a new silo storage system and the distribution and integration of ingredients into an existing mill plant. Over those nine months, I gained valuable leadership and project management experience. Alongside this, I also worked on the packaging line on the other side of the plant, installing control panels and equipment for an automated line that took cooked loose food through bagging and on to final box packaging.
