Locksmith

By LIANE VOISEY

Name: Markus Hughes

Age: 31

Job title: Locksmith and shop manager

Working hours: 8.30-5pm Monday to Friday

Employer(s): Allied Locksmiths. Generally, locksmiths work in businesses nationwide

Pay: $730 a week

Qualifications needed: Light engineering certificate is useful, although generally you start at the bottom as an apprentice.

Career prospects: Work your way up, train in different parts of the security business, then go on to start your own business.

Q. Describe what you do

A. I do most locksmith duties ranging from cutting keys, making new keys for locks, repairing car, household and commercial locks and giving advice to customers about any other security they may need. There's a huge variety of clientele - we get your secretary right through to the big bosses coming in for advice about security.

Q. Why did you choose this line of work?

A. I'm good with my hands and I feel this kind of job is helping people out in a way - it's got job satisfaction. It's not too repetitive and most jobs don't really take that long, so you don't get bored working in the same place for long periods of time. It's hands-on learning, with a little bit of theory you get from asking your workmates questions.

Q. What skills do you need?

A. You need patience, have a good head on you and you need to have problem-solving abilities. Sometimes you get things you've never seen before and you've got to work it out. You need to be good with your hands, have good hand-eye co-ordination because some of the things can get really fiddly.

Q. Any unusual/amusing assignments?

A. I had to go to a lockout which means the client has locked their keys inside their house or car. In this case it was a car and there was a baby locked inside.

The mother threw her keys into the car and the baby was fiddling around and flicked the switch that locks the doors. The baby was obviously a bit too young to work out that you've got to push the button again to open it up.

Then he was having a good go on the horn the whole time while I was trying to get the car open. I got it open fairly quickly I think which is good but it was pretty noisy, and a good loud horn too. That was funny.

Q. What is the most challenging aspect?

A. Quite often in Auckland the challenging part is getting to the job on time. Most times I do, but on occasion - just because of the amount of traffic - it gets a little frustrating. The amount of traffic on the roads is actually getting to be a big problem with the mobile locksmiths business at the moment - it slows you down, eating into about an hour of your day. Sometimes I can't fit that extra little job in at the end of the day.

Q. What are your hopes for the future?

A. I would like to look to take over this business or maybe start up one of my own, but that would probably be a while before I start thinking about doing that. I don't feel mature enough - I still play a lot of sport.

You're always learning in this business - it's challenging and there's a lot of stuff about electronic safes I don't know.

I may go back to tech and do some sort of electrical course which will help me with that field. Electronics are going a long way and the hardware is becoming less of an expense than it used to be.