My First Month at Castlefield - Nyle Yates

Hello! I’m the new (and I believe first?) official IT staff member at Castlefield. I have a varied background, including everything from working as a ride operator at a theme park to travelling the world! Having returned from said travels in 2016 I decided to settle down in Standish, Wigan and start building my career. I was lucky enough to walk through the doors of a local charity set up to provide day services for those with disabilities. They had recently opened and got off the ground at a blistering pace and had found themselves with around 20 staff, no IT systems and nobody to help them. Having always been good with technology, I offered a helping hand and to cut a long story short, 6 years later they had just shy of 200 staff and I was the IT Manager!

With the charity in a much better position than I had found them in, I decided to start looking for a new challenge. I knew that I wanted to work at a place with a great culture, somewhere more than just a place to pick up a payslip every month, somewhere with great staff and ethics. Then Castlefield popped up on Indeed, I checked out the job role and checked out the website. After watching the ‘life at Castlefield’ video I knew this was the place I wanted to work. Long story short again, 3 interviews and a Christmas period later here I am.

My first month at Castlefield has been unusual in the sense that I was starting a brand new job from my living room at home! However everything worked out ok in the end, as Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out with new rules enabling us to return to the office so I am currently typing this from the 8th Floor with a view of the Manchester city skyline. It has also been very busy! Between meeting new faces, completing CISI courses, getting to grips with the new systems and way of working, spending time cleaning out meeting room 3 and dealing with IT support requests - I really feel I have hit the ground running. For my next steps I am looking forward to getting stuck into some larger projects, learning skills in all the various aspects of IT that are new to me here, as well as using my knowledge in cloud computing to expand our use of Office 365 and improve our other systems alongside it.

In my spare time I co-run an outdoor adventure club called ‘Catch22Adventures’ which is completely free and open to all abilities. We mostly run local trips: walking, caving, rock climbing, abseiling etc but once a year we also host a big adventure holiday abroad. Most recently (although 4 years ago now.. thanks to COVID) a 20 person trip to Morocco to climb the highest mountain in North Africa, Jbel Toubkal. If any of my new colleagues are interested in joining up please give me a shout!

Written by Nyle Yates