Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My name's Corporal Brendan Michael Peters.
I'm a technician of electronic systems in
the Australian Army.
I work mostly on smaller electronics sort of equipment
and instrumentation systems.
I've been interested in electronics, or I've being
tinkering around with them all my life and played around with
them as a kid.
When I finished school, I was looking around for
apprenticeships.
And nothing really caught my eye, except for the army jobs.
And so a mate and I went along to recruiting.
And I ended up getting through, and he didn't.
I had to do a two year course in Aubrey to get all my trade
qualifications and my trade certificates.
And then after that, I did a year of on the job training,
which is hands on sort of work and moving around the
different units and different workshops to learn all your
different skills you're going to need.
And get all your sign-offs.
And then so after the three year period, then you're
basically fully qualified to work
unsupervised in a workshop.
I fix radios.
I fix night vision equipment, instrumentation, foreign
systems on armoured vehicles and your navigation.
Yeah, out here you can see we've got about four of these
shipping containers, all camouflaged up.
There are actually workshops inside the containers.
And they're built to look like containers and act like
containers.
So we can easily forklift them on to trucks or crane them
onto trucks.
It's good because it's stuff I would never get to work on
outside of the army.
You know, when you're working on fire systems and tanks and
that sort of thing, you'd never get to work on that sort
of thing outside the army.
New equipment comes out all the time, such as not finding
equipment and thermal imaging equipment.
As the new equipment roles out, we do courses that add to
our skill set.
It's just like a normal job in day to day.
I get to work with a lot of good people and meet a lot of
new people all the time.
People are always moving in an out and coming and going.
I have been twice to Iraq.
The first time was in southern Iraq in the desert.
And the second time was in Baghdad City.
The most challenging aspect would probably be the time
away from your family and putting your family through
that sort of thing, as well.
Yeah, you do.
You have to go on every so often.
There's phones provided there for you to do that.
And you know it, as well, so you can email your family and
that sort of thing.
It opens your eyes to how other people live and some of
the bad things that are going on all around the place.
It's made me appreciate life in Australia a little bit
more, and the Australian way of life more.
I'd recommend it to plenty of young people, especially doing
a technical trade in the army because you get
trained fairly quickly.
You get on the good pay quickly.
And you get to work on a lot of different
and interesting equipment.
And it sets you up well for life.