🌃 Working nights is not for everyone, but for some of the dads on our ops team, the night shift is one of the benefits of the job!
Paul, a colleague in our operations team, told us how his night shift schedule means he’s able to pick his daughters up from school every day and spend time with them making tea before his wife gets home from work. It not only enables him to be a hands on dad, he told us, but saves the family a fortune in wraparound childcare too.
Read more about what Paul had to say about being part of our operations team in this blog.
If you’re looking for a night shift role or you know anyone who is, take a look at the careers page on our website to find out more about our vacancies.
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When Paul Aparicio first joined the operations team at our Detling depot in Kent almost exactly six years ago, he was looking for a career change. And what a huge change, it was! He not only took on a new job role, but transformed his lifestyle too. Previously a butcher in a supermarket, working the same daytime hours in the same location every week, he became part of a team at Highway Care where every shift is different, working outdoors, mostly at night, in locations around the country.
“I enjoyed my role as a butcher,’ Paul explains, ‘but I was ready for a change and a friend of mine already worked as part of the ops team at Highway Care. He was always telling me stories about where he’d been deployed and what a great team environment it was. Back then, Highway Care didn’t have a referral scheme like we do now, but they were hiring and I applied and got the job.’
Paul adapted quickly to the lifestyle changes, finding that he fell quite quickly into his new routine of working mostly nights.
‘One of the things that surprised me most was that I actually saw more of my family after I began working at Highway Care, despite the night shifts and time away. I can often pick up my daughter from school and she’s so excited when I turn up to collect her.’
Family relationships are not the only ones that became a major advantage of Paul’s role with Highway Care; he also highlights the team environment as a huge factor in why he loves the job.
‘We work in a tough environment where we rely on each other for safety and spend a lot of time together. It’s like a family – if someone is not quite themselves or is having a tough shift, one of us will always check in on them. We keep each other going and support one another.’
The camaraderie of the Highway Care team was one of the things that Paul missed most when he briefly left the company for another completely different role in July 2023, only to return just four months later.
He explains: ‘I lost my father and really felt like I needed to make a change. It’s clear to me now that changing jobs was part of the grieving process; I had focused on fixing something, but the job wasn’t the problem at all, in fact, I really missed the team, the physical work, and the time with my family that my role at Highway Care had given me.’
Having swapped his Highway Care role for a job installing acoustic insulation in the city of London, Paul found that he had less time with his family than ever.
‘I was leaving the house at 5am and getting home exhausted at 7pm,’ he continues. ‘I hardly saw the children and I really missed working as part of a team where everyone looks out of each other.’
Luckily, Paul got back in touch to see whether he might be able to return to Highway Care, and we were only too happy to invite him back. His skills and can-do approach are valuable both to the company, and to the contractors who rely on us to deploy our BG800 portable steel barrier where and when they need it, anywhere in the country.
‘I was so pleased that I was able to step back into my old role,’ Paul adds, ‘and it was as though I had never been away. If anything, I think doing a different job for a while has made me appreciate my role with Highway Care even more, and the benefits of being part of a close-knit team. It has felt like coming home.’
With Highway Care now recruiting for new team members for a similar role based out of our Upton depot to service barrier deployment projects across the South West and beyond, what would Paul’s advice be to operatives considering applying to Highway Care?
‘If you enjoy working as part of a team and you want a job that has real value, helping to keep people safer as they work on maintaining and improving our roads, give it a go. It’s really rewarding and the accommodation you get when you’re working away is pretty decent too!’
