Jobs

Duties of a Technical Assistant

Hi my name is Waynette Bayley and I’m a Technical Assistant for Hertfordshire Highways in the Midwest Area, a position I have held for over a year. I was successful in progressing from an Admin Assistant role to a Technical Assistant Role within the highway service environment. The difference is that as a Technical Assistant you can progress to becoming an Area Engineer, go on a day release and to gain qualifications.

In essence I provide the first point of contact for the customer part of the highway service, process and manage the way in which information collected from the public and private companies wishing to work on the highway. In a typical day I can be involved in a variety of tasks involving processing customer service requests liaising with the Area Engineers to resolve these requests.

The public will make contact on an all aspects of highway services through various means, by telephone, the generic email address and letters. I need to look at these and decide should respond or resolve the problem. I will also log all these forms of communication including emails received on to our Correspondence Logging System and monitor to ensure a proper response is provided.

In addition, I have more specific technical jobs to do too; this includes processing all applications for the request of Disabled Parking Bays and Vehicle Crossovers.
In order to complete the process of the Vehicle Crossover we log on all cheques received for the payment fee onto a spreadsheet in which finance will use and our own spreadsheet that will identify our new customer with a reference number. Part of the process is to request public utility information known as Stats Request on behalf of the Area Engineers. In order for us to request these stats we have to produce a special location map using a software package known as the GIS (Graphical Information System). Once we completed the necessary paper work it is then faxed over to Highways House. The GIS software isn’t just used for processing vehicle crossovers; it can be used at any time to clarify a location on the highway.
I also process all Insurance Claims for damages to property or personal injury caused by a defect on the highway. Log all faults that had been received onto our fault logging system known as Hermis. Draft correspondence in a letter format.

The ability to use IT packages such as word, excel is needed as we manage numerous databases on a daily basis for as majority of our workload is connected to using the databases.

I do enjoy this role; it provides me with an opportunity to personally develop my skills and to learn more about working in a customer services and highway engineering environment.