3 Minutes With Our Engineering Manager

3 Minutes With Our Engineering Manager

Meet Jonathan Connolly, APH’s Engineering Manager. Jonathan oversees a team of engineers and the overhauls and repairs of our combine harvester hire fleet. From liaising with customers to planning work routes, Jonathan and his team are the ones behind our second-to-none engineering help and support.

We wanted to find out more about Jonathan’s background, his day-to-day responsibilities and the challenges and potential within this industry.

Got three minutes? Meet our Engineering Manager:

Did you always want to be an engineer?

When I was 16 years old, I left school and came to APH in the summer to clean the workshops and paint the floors whilst the engineers were out and about fixing combines.

At this time, I had planned to be a chef; college was booked for the September and up until then all my part time jobs were in catering - my future was all planned out!

Whilst carrying out the summer job to earn some money, I got to see combines and lots of agricultural machinery. This new world of machinery was fascinating to me, and when I saw that APH was advertising for two apprentices – I applied, got accepted and my life took a new direction.

What made you choose agricultural engineering?

Seeing these huge combine harvesters and tractors (in those days they seemed huge to me, but they are dwarfed by todays modern agricultural machines) sparked something in me.

APH had some very good people working there and the whole industry looked exciting. The engineers had fully kitted out vans and were travelling all over England fixing the combines, I also loved the idea of going to college whilst earning money.

What does a typical day look like for you?

My main responsibilities are to manage the overhauls and repairs of our combine harvester hire fleet and to keep the van engineers busy on the road looking after customers’ own machines.

This means spending lots of time at my desk speaking to customers, going through parts books, planning work, and dealing with the day-to-day challenges that occur in all jobs.

I also help look after any day-to-day IT hardware and software issues.

What do you find most challenging about this industry?

Over the years, agricultural equipment has become state of the art, the machines are more technical than they have ever been, and a big challenge is to keep up with this level of sophistication so we can continue offering a great service to our customers.

What do you love the most about your job?

I enjoy working with great people in a vital industry for our country. Working within the agriculture sector is very rewarding as you feel genuinely part of one of the most important areas of our lives, the production of food, something we need more than ever in the future.

I’ve really enjoyed the evolution of combines from the early 1530’s and TX6 series machines, which I worked on as a 16-year-old, up to the modern CR10.90’s, this progression of capacity and technology is great to be involved with.