To mark the 25th anniversary of the merger of Trowbridge, Lackham and Chippenham colleges to form Wiltshire College, we are featuring staff who have served the college before and since the merger.
If there’s one area that has seen the most change in the 25 years since the creation of Wiltshire College it is probably IT and Chris Holt has been witness to all of it.
He joined Trowbridge College almost 33 years ago in a part-time role after leaving the Army. “I was working in the Orbit, as it was known then, which was a drop-in resource centre with computers for students,” he recalls. “They were all stand-alone desktop PCs, we had no network then.”
From the early days of college IT
Living in today’s digital world, it is hard to comprehend that just 25 years ago that typewriters, word processors and manual filing was commonplace. “There were hardly any computers and they were very much a teaching aid then, rather than a work aid for the college,” says Chris. “It was not long after I joined that the then director began to see the potential for their use all over the college.”
As their use expanded so did Chris’ role and he became a full-time member of an expanded IT team at Trowbridge.
Connecting the colleges
In 2000, when the college merged with Chippenham and Lackham, IT was the key to its success. Three separate computer networks based miles apart had to become one, processes needed to be integrated and systems had to be able to talk to each other.
“From our perspective, there was a lot of work involved in connecting everything up,” says Chris. “Chippenham and Trowbridge were providing a very similar range of courses but everything had to be standardised. They had to come up with solutions to how they were going to work in the bigger college.
“By then all the colleges had their own networks but they had to be linked up. Trowbridge became the hub, so links were put in from Trowbridge to Lackham and to Chippenham. It was hard work but we made it all work smoothly in the end.”
A bigger family
These days Chris has chosen to work part-time and concentrates on compliance, ensuring software at all four sites, plus Castle Combe, is up to date. He says the biggest changes he has seen in the way the college works is the demand placed upon the technology.
“I suppose the most recent and biggest change is the demand for mobile working and working from home,” he says. “Obviously Covid was a good example of that and there was quite a lot of work then to get so many people connected.
“The networking aspect has also been a huge change, because people were all stand-alone when I joined. Once you start networking together, you can start doing things more centrally with management of equipment, people on the network, everybody has to have a login, for example.
“Over the years I became more involved in the network admin side, administering the users and supporting new people who came in. I was also involved on the financial side as well, obviously a lot of stuff to buy over the years.”
Another aspect of the job that has changed is the need for vigilance again cyber-attacks. “Cyber security used to be something someone did as part of their job but now we have someone whose sole focus is on that because it is so serious,” says Chris. “The same with data protection, we now have someone who concentrates on GDPR.”
Despite the explosion of opportunities in the IT sector over the last two decades Chris has remained with the college. “I think it’s relationships you have with other people,” he cites as a reason why. “Over time, you walk around the college, you see somebody you’ve known for absolutely years. You don’t see them every day, but stop and have a chat with them, which is lovely.”
He feels the merger of the colleges created a bigger, more together set-up. “You obviously had to get to know people, now you were talking to people at Chippenham and Lackham a lot more than you used to,” he recalls.
“On the network admin side, you got to know names of people and once they started putting photographs on the system, you realised, ‘oh, it’s you, I recognise you’. So, yes, I think it became like a bigger family, all the colleges together.”
Read more staff stories from across Wiltshire College & University Centre
As part of our 25th anniversary celebrations, we’re sharing the experiences of long-serving staff who have helped shape the college over the past quarter-century.
