Charlotte Hickie

In my current role I am part of a large team of technical staff working in the teaching super lab at Coventry University. As the Grade 6 Senior Technician/Skills Instructor responsible for molecular biology, my duties include:

• Development of protocols for lab classes
• Troubleshooting and maintenance of equipment
• Ordering of consumables
• Writing risk assessments
• Writing SOPs
• Creating and maintaining inventories
• Preparing materials for classes
• General laboratory housekeeping

As a skills instructor I also demonstrate techniques and equipment to students and staff, and create resources such as instructional videos.

The senior technicians in our team are responsible for training and mentoring sandwich placement students and apprentices, and I also have line management and training responsibility for two posts - a Grade 5 Senior Technician in molecular biology and a Grade 4 Technician.

The technicians in our team are multidisciplinary, so in addition to my specialism of molecular biology I also work in microbiology, biochemistry and cell culture.

As a Grade 5 Senior Technician, my duties were similar to those of my current role, minus the line management and training responsibilities and some of the administrative ones.

I joined the teaching labs team at Coventry University as a Grade 4 Technician, when the School of Life Sciences were in the process of moving from our old building into the new Alison Gingell building. This involved multiple teams who had previously had their own lab space being merged into one team in the new superlab. As challenging as this process was, it was a wonderful opportunity to be part of setting up a new lab space and gave me valuable experience in setting up systems for a diverse team to work collaboratively.

Based in the Medical School at Birmingham University, my role was primarily centred around the new Pharmacy labs. I was taken on during the first year of the new Pharmacy course, which meant that a large part of my role was to test and fine tune practical classes, liaising with academic staff to adjust them as necessary. Together with the other technicians, I prepared, set out and cleared away class materials, also acting as a demonstrator during the lab sessions.

This short-term contract was to assist in a clinical study examining the effectiveness of contact lens cleaning solutions. My role was to sample and enumerate bacteria from contact lens cases, Gram stain them and preserve them in glycerol stocks for further analysis. I also extracted proteins from the contact lenses themselves. I was also responsible for general housekeeping, ordering consumables and liaising with internal and external suppliers/contactors.

My first role as a technician was in microbiology food testing, both for due diligence and urgent testing in response to disease outbreaks. My duties included preparing agars and broths, weighing out food samples, enumerating and sub culturing bacteria, maintaining stock cultures and conducting bacterial identification tests by both traditional and molecular methods. These included use of selective agars, Gram staining, observing motility, oxidase testing, catalase testing and miniaturised biochemical test strips, as well as real time PCR and ELISA testing.

After moving to live with my parents following a period of ill health, I worked as a cleaner for a small business. Having been pleased with my work and because I had previously done some administrative work on a voluntary basis, the owner promoted me to assistant manager. As well as continuing to clean, my duties included liaising with customers and staff to ensure that bookings were covered, sending out invoices, trialling and training new staff and dealing with complaints.