What 29 Years at BT Taught Me About Security
Published October 2026
“You should apply for BT. I know someone who works for BT International. It’s a very good job.”
That was my mum’s advice when I was 16.
I was a very introverted teenager and, if my memory serves me correctly, there’s every possibility she actually filled in the application for me.
She was right, by the way.
It was a very good job.
I stayed for 29 years.
When a Job Really Could Be for Life
This was a different era.
BT hadn’t yet become the company people know today. It felt more like the Civil Service — a huge institution where you could reasonably expect to spend your entire working life.
At 16, I certainly wasn’t thinking about pensions or planning the next 40 years.
I was just starting work.
But the idea of a career for life was perfectly normal.
Get into a good company. Work hard. Progress if you can. Build up a pension. Eventually retire.
That was security.
And for a very long time, it worked.
Release 92
The first really significant voluntary redundancy programme I remember was called Release 92.
It was enormous.
By then I'd been with BT for around 14 years, so I was still very much mid-career. There would be many more release schemes and reorganisations over the years, but I never particularly felt that my own job was disappearing underneath me.
I worked in Power Section.
We had electricians, HVAC engineers, people working on exchange construction and a workshop with metalworkers and carpenters.
Management structures could change. Departments could be reorganised. We could be moved from pillar to post on an organisational chart.
But telephone exchanges still needed power, cooling, electrical systems and people who knew how to look after them.
The managers changed.
The work remained.
Perhaps that taught me my first lesson about security without me realising it:
being useful is a form of security.
There's an old saying I like about a bird sitting on a branch. The bird isn't frightened that the branch might break, because its security doesn't come from the branch. It comes from knowing it has wings.
I certainly wouldn't have expressed it that way at the time, but looking back, that's partly what those years at BT were giving me.
The organisation provided the branch.
The skills I was developing were the wings.
From a Shy Teenager to Management
BT gave me much more than a salary.
I arrived as a very introverted 16-year-old and eventually progressed to become an MPG4 manager — a second-line management role.
It didn't turn me into an extrovert.
I'm still an introvert.
What changed was my understanding of what I was capable of.
BT trained me in electrical work, high-voltage systems, welding and management. Remarkably, they even sent me away on a two-week driving course and I came back with a shiny new full driving licence.
But some of the most valuable things weren't certificates.
I learned how a huge organisation worked.
I learned how to manage people.
I learned how to construct a business case.
And I discovered that if I really knew my stuff, I could stand in front of a group of very senior BT managers and present that case without quaking in my boots.
That was quite a discovery for the teenager who'd once felt intimidated by the world around him.
Confidence didn't come from becoming somebody else.
A lot of it came from competence.
Then I Chose to Leave
After 29 years, another release scheme arrived.
By this point, my thinking had changed considerably.
I'd become interested in internet marketing. Emma and I had experimented with affiliate marketing and even had one glorious month when a diet product we were promoting suddenly took off after being mentioned by someone famous.
A cheque arrived for nearly $1,000.
For a brief moment, it looked very exciting.
Then it stopped.
That was one of my early lessons in the difference between income and reliable income.
When BT announced the release scheme, I requested an estimate.
There was no pressure on me to leave. In fact, applying didn't necessarily mean BT would let me go. If my role was considered important enough, the application could be refused.
But when I saw the figures, I had a decision to make.
I chose to go.
After 29 years of security, I voluntarily walked away from it.
Discovering What Security Really Means
Leaving BT didn't produce a neat entrepreneurial success story.
There wasn't a moment where I collected my release package on Friday and effortlessly replaced my salary on Monday.
We explored investment property.
Internet marketing wasn't producing enough.
Whitstable Computer Repair became another option, but initially that wasn't producing enough to support our family either.
Emma and I even trained as childminders, and she subsequently ran a childminding business for some time.
We adapted.
We tried things.
Some worked better than others.
And gradually my understanding of security changed.
The World Changed Too
My mum's advice to that 16-year-old boy was good advice for its time.
Find a good employer. Learn useful skills. Build a career.
But I'm not convinced that relying entirely upon one employer feels quite as secure today.
We've watched enormous household names disappear.
Industries have changed beyond recognition.
Technology has made some jobs possible and others unnecessary.
And the cost of simply running a household has changed too.
There was a time when a single breadwinner supporting a family was considered perfectly normal. Even during my parents' working lives, two incomes increasingly became necessary.
Today, many people are discovering that even two salaries don't necessarily create the financial breathing room they expected.
The world keeps changing.
So perhaps our definition of security needs to change with it.
I Wouldn't Give Back Those 29 Years
It's important to say this.
This isn't an argument against employment.
BT gave me an enormous amount.
Training. Skills. Friends. Experience. Confidence. An understanding of business and management that I've carried into everything I've done since.
And a pension.
Even though I chose to take that pension at 55, it still provides us with an income each month equivalent to roughly half what our Utility Warehouse business currently produces.
Those 29 years are still contributing to our lives today.
So I don't look back and think I should never have been employed.
Quite the opposite.
I look back and realise that my definition of security has evolved.
What Security Means to Me Now
At 16, security meant finding a good job.
For much of my working life, it meant developing useful skills and making myself valuable.
Today, I think about it differently again.
I no longer believe security necessarily means finding one organisation, one business or one source of income that will look after you indefinitely.
For me, it means gradually building enough skills, resources, relationships and sources of income that you're better able to cope when something changes.
A pension can be part of that.
Savings can be part of it.
A business can be part of it.
An additional income can be part of it.
Skills you can take somewhere else can be part of it.
None of those things guarantees that life will always go according to plan.
That's not what security means to me anymore.
Perhaps real security isn't knowing that nothing will ever go wrong.
It's knowing that if something does, you have choices.