Introduction

Hello! I’m Matt Pike and I thought I’d begin sharing my story with you.

So what is my story so far?

To give you an introduction on myself I will go right back to the start. I started an apprenticeship straight after GCSEs. I knew that school was not for me, I wanted to be able to see the relevance in what I was learning. I began putting more effort into my life surrounding school, which at the time was graphic and web design. This lead to me getting, perhaps, sub par grades. Despite not meeting their entry requirements, Teledyne e2v offered me a place on their apprenticeship scheme on the provision that I resat and passed my English GCSE.

I have been an apprentice for Teledyne e2v for what will be 6 years in September. For the first 3 years of my apprenticeship I was training to become a technician. I then moved over to an engineering apprenticeship that saw me completing a HNC. After completion of my HNC it was realised the college had not performed the units that they should have in order to map across to my HND. This formed a talking point for my employer and I. We then decided that I would become a management apprentice, skip HND, and go in at degree level. The course that was selected was a Business Innovation and Applied Management Degree, run via a Chartered Management Degree Apprenticeship. At present — I am 1 year into this 3 year degree, throughout the apprenticeship I am studying 1 day a week and working the remaining 4.

Alongside my apprenticeship I run a web and graphic design business, MP Creations LTD. Registered in 2014 to formalise my hobby at the time. MP Creations still sees a lot of my efforts today, as I use the funds to start a new Trading Name, TheTekWorks, supplying tech accessories.

So why have I set up this blog? Well I have been listening to a podcast from Jim Kwik, and he always says than when you teach something, you get to learn it twice. Once when you learn it, and again when you teach it. So the idea came to me to begin blogging what I learn at university. Then I thought if I’m going to do that then maybe I could include what I do with my business, my attempts at starting additional businesses, making investments and business in general. The more I thought about it the more I talked myself into it, thinking that if I could learn from someone trying the same things as me, and learn what techniques worked for them and what didn’t, perhaps it would accelerate my development. So here I am. Writing a blog. I hope you can find it useful.

Whilst I will try to be as open as possible to my successes and failures throughout my everyday life, the one thing I cannot discuss with you is my job. Those of you who know Teledyne e2v will know we get involved in various projects whereby we supply military product to the ministry of defence and space imaging sensors to space agencies across the globe. All very interesting stuff… but I would hate to give away any IP. For this reason, my blog will remain about my businesses and study’s.

Hope you enjoyed this introduction. See you in the next one where I will begin bringing you up to date!

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