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Veteran finding his place in the variety offered by agriculture

Former Royal Tank Regiment Lance Corporal Lewis Rollings is thriving in his new role as an agricultural service technician - bringing qualities to the team that his employer really values.

Lewis Rollings explains more about finding his place in agriculture after leaving the Armed Forces.

When Lewis Rollings left the Royal Tank Regiment, he didn’t expect to find his next calling among tractors and crop sprayers. Yet today, as a service technician at Coates Ben Burgess, he’s thriving in agricultural engineering - a field he discovered through a military recruitment event.

As a Lance Corporal in the Royal Tank Regiment, Lewis hadn’t imagined the next step in his career to be working in farming and growing, but he’s been pleasantly surprised by the opportunities he’s discovered in the industry.

“I found this opportunity through a career day as I was leaving the Army. I hadn’t considered agriculture before, but I popped down for the day and I liked it.”

That career day proved pivotal. It introduced him to a world where his military experience could be repurposed in meaningful ways.

“The transferable skills I got from the Army was in the servicing side of things,” he says.

“Obviously I serviced a lot of tanks and other bits and bobs in the Army, so scheduling and servicing as well. When you progress in the Army, you do a lot of booking in, tracking and moving vehicles, and I think that’s worked a lot in my favour as I joined this industry.”

Lewis Rollings is enjoying the variety offered by his role in agricutural servicing.

Hands-on approach helping him grab new opportunity

Thankfully, this practical experience and the hands-on nature of his new role helped Lewis transition into his new career path in a really smooth way.

“One week I was in the Army. Then I came here and nothing really changed for me. It was just, ‘this is my new job, this is what I do now’.”

As a service technician, Lewis’ new role involves a mix of workshop tasks and fieldwork.

“Day-to-day work is kind of similar to what I’d done before – although I didn’t work on as many different vehicles in the Army as we get in the workshop here. Course, it does vary, some days you get the same sort of flow, but other days when you're out and about it can be a bit more intense.”

This level of variety and mobility is something Lewis really appreciates in his new role.

“I’m not stuck in one place for long. You know, there might be a day or two in the depot, then out on site for a day or two – different sites throughout the day. So I do a lot of travel, which is good.”

Lewis’ tasks range from routine servicing to emergency repairs. “An average day could be anything from servicing a vehicle or getting to a broken-down bit of equipment. We go out there, try and to do our best to fix it if we can on the spot. If not, we may need to refer to them.”

Lewis is working with a wider range of machines in his new role htan he did in the Army.

Skills and knowledge crucial to Lewis' success

Lewis says the learning curve has been steep in his new role, but he embraces it.

“Getting back to the skills and knowledge I’ve learned since taking on this role is – well, there’s not enough fingers on my hand to count. It’s learning everything; it feels like I learn something new every day and I can be learning completely new areas of mechanics.

“For example, I didn’t know much about electrics before, but I now know enough to get me out of trouble,” he says.

“The technical knowledge understanding has improved. Where I was just sort of focused on servicing in the armed forces, I’m now diagnosing and trying to fault finds and rectify them.”

Getting the right support can be crucial to making a success of moving on from the Armed Forces into civilian roles. Recognising this, Lewis enrolled on a military transition scheme which includes academic training as well as practical, hands-on learning.

“As part of the transition scheme, I took John Deere University’s online program – level one and two is all done in-house on a laptop. Level three I went to Langar (Nottinghamshire) where I tackled a mixture of online courses and practical experiences.”

This educational support has been instrumental in helping Lewis learn about the machinery he now works on each day, starting with an introduction to the key tools they use each day before looking more in-depth at the different machines he will be working on in his role.

And Lewis works on a quite literally a huge range of machinery in his role – tackling everything from John Deere’s range of compact tractors up to the massive 33-tonne 9RX tractors.

Lewis' employer values the transferable skills he's brought into the team from his time in the Army.

Huge variety of the role adding to Lewis' enjoyment

Variety can be key to enjoyment for many people in their civilian roles – and certainly Lewis draws a lot of joy from this too. Whether he’s in the workshop or on the road, performing routine services or diagnosing faults, meeting new clients or building on existing relationships, Lewis is thriving in his role as an agricultural service technician.

And his success today is built on the foundations of key skills he developed in the Armed Forces. His commitment to learning new skills, teamwork, maintaining standards of work and getting the job done are all hugely appreciated by his manager, Aidan Moore.

“I definitely enjoy the job,” he says simply. And with every new challenge, every new machine, and every new site, Lewis Rollings continues to prove that the road from tanks to tractors is not only possible – it’s rewarding.