Martin Stott, Operations Manager, West Midlands RCC

The West Midlands Regional Control Centre's (RCC) high-tech and successful innovations have changed the face of road traffic management nationally and internationally, attaching excitement and glamour to a career traditionally regarded as staid.

Martin Stott, operations manager at the West Midlands RCC, tells Road Traffic Technology's Paul French what it takes to join traffic's own 'guardian angels'.

Paul French: What jobs are available here and what do they involve?

Martin Stott: "The two main roles here are control room operator and on-road traffic officer. Anybody who works on the operational side does shift-based work. On-road shifts are six on, three off with three 'earlies' and three 'lates' or three days and three nights. For control room staff, there's more shifts to cover and the patterns are more erratic. People are paid a shift allowance which is a big part of their salary."

PF: What qualifications do you need for these roles?

MS: "We ask that you have a reasonable level of education. It depends what role you are applying for. For on-road, you need a clean driving licence whereas an operator will have their level of computer accuracy measured."

"To join, you have to go through an assessment centre, which has been specifically set up for benchmarking and ticking off the criteria. There is a competency-based interview, written assessment, a group exercise and some pyschometric evaluation to go through. If candidates are successful, they're offered a place in the region that they've applied for and they'll come into training."

PF: What training do people have to do before they can be let loose in the operations room or on the roads?

MS: "An on-road traffic officer or control room operator goes into training for five weeks. They get a level of condensed high-level training, which has been developed to specifically meet the needs of a traffic officer."

"Once they come out of training and they've passed, they'll come into the on-road or operations room environment and they are monitored until they have reached a level where they can be signed off. In essence they have between four and six months training. To go onto signs and signals setting is another level and requires another period of training with a qualified mentor. It's very technical and it's important that you get it right because there are huge outcomes if people set the wrong signs."

PF: Do they come out with any specific traffic-related qualifications?

MS: "They do a specific work book that has been created for the agency. We've developed City & Guilds qualifications as we've gone on. This isn't an off-the-shelf role that you can go out and say, 'right, I'm going to get trained in signs and signals now.' This is specific to us and we've had to develop that."

"We've done other things to make sure that we reach professional standards. The training was originally provided by police driving instructors but it's now done by our own driving instructors who are highly trained and have gone through a number of training courses to make sure they meet the benchmark of advanced motorists. In terms of the control room operators we've brought in specialists who have helped to develop the courses to make sure they meet the required criteria."

PF: What attributes are you looking for in your staff?

MS: "Customer service is the prime focus. You've got to be aware that when you're out and about on the network that it is a customer-facing role. A level of common sense is also applicable to ensure that you are doing the right things, as-is the ability to train or be re-trained."

"We've got people who've had what they might class as their primary career. They may have had 30 years in the police, or been in the forces. There's any number of those people and they have to be able to re-train so they adapt their skills into the right circumstances for the Highways Agency."

"Once they get in a Highways Agency vehicle if they've been a serving police officer, they must realise they've no longer got blue lights, a heavy foot and a warrant card so they have to go to incidents at 70mph and deal with it in a an agency way."

"We've also got people from other backgrounds. We've got people who came out of the civil service and fancied a change, people who've come out of the car industry – we picked up a lot of people from Rover when they closed down – plus people who've left college and university."

PF: What are the best and worst things about the job?

MS: "I can speak for the control room and the on-road as I've worked in both environments. A nice summer's day on the road driving around patrolling your network is fantastic when everything's working properly."

"The flip side of that is when you're out in howling gales and torrential rain when you're stuck out for three, four, five hours and you know everyone else is busy and you're not going to get relieved. That can be a drawback because you're soaked and you're cold and there seems no end to your day."

"From the control room point of view it's the same – when things are working well, it's a fantastic environment to work in. When there is a major incident and you escalate to another level it can be quite a traumatic environment in terms of the pressure and stress for short periods of time."

"But getting the job done from either point of view is the major plus and it can be rewarding. You do get letters and phone calls from the public saying they've had a great experience."

PF: With the possibility of coming across car accidents on a daily basis, do you need to be of stern stomach to work here?

MS: "The nature of the job means that a large percentage of the time, traffic officers are the first ones to arrive at the scene of an accident. It can be upsetting and traumatic and traffic officers do tend to see things much as fire officers, police officers and paramedics do and it does tend to have an effect on them."

"Some people may have dealt with death and serious injury in previous roles, those who've come from office and civil service environments haven't. We have a counselling service for people who are traumatised. All team managers are trained in trauma diffusion so they can talk to traffic officers about the incident that they've dealt with and any upset that may have happened."

PF: How successful are you at recruiting people?

MS: "The two organisations that work for us doing the recruitment have been doing this since the beginning and they pretty much get it right. They get the right people in for the right types of post."

PF: Is this an attractive place to work in terms of salaries and benefits?

MS: "I think so. With any organisation, people need to remember why they left the role they were doing, but we don't have a big staff turnover. If the job wasn't delivering to what people wanted, the turnover would be a lot bigger. Perhaps the organisation hasn't evolved as quickly as people would have liked but we've only been around four years and we've evolved massively. The police took many decades to evolve into what they've become. We still need to give ourselves time. We're a very young organisation and we still need to be able to develop."

PF: How can people progress here? Is there a career ladder?

MS: "There's scope for lots of development within the agency. We don't just operate down one clear avenue. Once people get into the agency within the traffic officer service, they can look at other roles within the Highways Agency and self-develop."

"There's a structure within the traffic officer service which is: traffic officer or operator; team manager either on-road or in the control room; operations manager and regional manager, and there are lots of branches off that into areas where people can go into what we call the mainstream agency, which has lots of facets like engineering, customer service and HR. We've got a number of people who've gone into the mainstream agency and tried to develop their careers there. There's a lot of scope."