Lucid Staff – all experts in their fields
The most important factors in training are the skills and experience of the trainer. At Lucid, all of our trainers are very highly qualified experts within their specialist areas, with years of industry experience, as well as many years of experience as professional trainers. Furthermore, our trainers are long-term members of staff, involved in developing and updating “their” courses. They are not just contract trainers who come in to go through the motions.
Below we list the tutors currently involved with our online and remote training programmes;
John Colton, BSc (Hons): Technical Director
John’s background is in optical fibre instrumentation, measurements, calibration & troubleshooting. He has worked with most fibre measurement instruments over the years, and is an expert on OTDR, PMD and chromatic dispersion measurements, not to mention a few less well known fibre measurements! John’s other areas of expertise includes fibre networks components and design, but advanced technology amd most recently FTTX networks. In addition, John has been involved in laser safety and in particular the applications to telecoms since 1997.
John has been elected a director of the Fibreoptic Industry Association (FIA) since 2004, since 2017 as overall Technical Director. John is currently working more on skills and industry qualifications for various organisations, primarily the FIA, City & Guilds and the Open Awards.
As well as training, John has been retained as an expert witness in several major telecoms dispute that has now been successfully resolved. He is currently retained as consultant by City and Guilds for the development of their 3668, 3667, 3666, 3662 and 3663 programmes. John has also assisted in the development of several awards, at different levels, through the Open Awards and Open College Network (OCN), for both the cabling industry and the ICT industry.
Alistair McMeekin, BSc(Hons): Technical Trainer
Alistair came into fibre optics from a background in IT cabling and datacoms networking. From very early in his career Alistair has been involved in training, gaining experience with a wide variety of training development and delivery including both conventional and online training materials. Alistair first started working as a specialist fibre optics trainer in 1998, and has been responsible for course development and delivery in both fibre optics and copper communications cabling for several employers, gaining a wide ranging experience of different industry sectors.
Alistair has worked on course development and qualifications in a wide range of fibre optics fields, but in particular was responsible for developing one of the first fibre optics training courses aimed at the umbilical cable industry with specialist subsea cables.
William Thompson, BSc (Hons): Technical Trainer
William has an extensive background in training worldwide, and is the lead trainer on several of our programmes aimed at getting trainees from challenging backgrounds into work as fibre installers. William has also taken on our duct installation courses, and is working with Annette on the development of our port-folio based qualifications.
Annette Colton, MSc, PhD: Director, Internal Verifier
Annette is involved in the development of our advanced courses and consultancy work. Her Master’s degree is from the Danish Technical University where she won several scholarships. Her PhD thesis was on work carried out at the prestigious European JET Joint Undertaking project near Oxford, on secondment from Risø the Danish National Laboratory.
Annettes background is in experimental plasma physics, radiation transfer, and Earth observation by satellites for environmental monitoring. She has authored several peer-reviewed journal and conference papers on these subjects, much of this work having involved mathematical and computer modelling. Annette has since been responsible for several of Lucid’s client consultancy projects involving the mathematical modelling of optical and fibre optic problems, as well as laser and LED safety projects, courses and software .
In addition, Annette is theour approved Internal Verifier for both Open Awards and City & Guilds, and most recently she been developing our new NVQ style qualifications and our Open Awards qualification scheme.