Staff Introduction: Piers Davies-smith

Hello all, I'm Piers, technical director at One IT Support.

I started at One IT in 2013 when I was finishing off my university degree at Northumbria, but I have been interested in technology for as long as I can remember. In fact, I remember playing around with my parents’ Windows 3.1 laptop when I was in primary school. How’s that for a throwback? From then on, I was constantly taking apart computers and rebuilding them, learning about the components and getting a feel for what each individual mechanism did.

As part of my degree I worked at the Centre for Life as an IT Assistant, it didn’t take long for my boss to realise I could manage the work load so was trusted with tasks early on. Due to internal politics he actually quit, so I offered to fill in his role until they found someone else, which they jumped at. I then entered into my final year of university and applied for part time work, which is how I found One IT. The initial job application was for someone to carry out simple repairs, but during my interview Richard, our managing director, found out that I could actually do a lot more than that. My first day at One IT was with one of our current biggest clients, the company had asked us to pitch to solve a problem and I managed to sort it out within two days! Not a bad start.

Sometimes it is difficult to get across the benefits of hiring an external company for IT, but think of it this way, you don’t have to pay the team a salary, worry about HR or hiring the right person, deal with issues in the office that may arise, sick, maternity, paternity or holiday pay! It really is a no brainer in my eyes.

One of the best aspects of my job is the variety of clients we have. We work with both small and large offices and with each new client comes a new wave of IT support that we can offer them. Though we are a relatively small team, we work with multimillion pound companies because we are experts in what we do and our problem-solving skills are world class.