The impact of Tony's deafness on his career at EMI
Tony joined EMI when he was 16 to train for engineering on a sandwich course and by 24 he was a fully qualified engineer with membership of the Institutes of Engineering and the Association of British Radio Engineers. The first signs of tinnitus and deafness became apparent while he was still in training. Tinnitus was detected when he went for tests at the local hospital at the age of 18, and he first realised that he was beginning to lose his hearing at the age of 21 when he noticed that he could no longer hear birdsong.
A few years later he started to wear a hearing aid in his right ear, and from then on his hearing deteriorated. He had to have more powerful hearing aids (which he bought privately); and he taught himself to lipread by watching current affairs programmes on TV.
His deafness influenced his choice of jobs within the firm almost from the start. As soon as he was fully qualified, he began working on electronics in the firm's record engineering department. This work required an acute sense of hearing; but he soon discovered that he could not produce balanced sound recordings beyond a frequency of 5 kilohertz. By the age of 25 he had moved on to a department dealing with solid state physics, which required visual rather than auditory assessment.
At the age of 30 he moved again to a department dealing with military electronics and became fascinated by military radar systems. He took work home and studied technical manuals until he became an expert. In the meantime he was beginning to have difficulty in hearing the telephone ring and in understanding what callers said; so he encouraged them to write to him instead.
Throughout the 1970s and 80s the company was selling large quantities of military radar equipment to several foreign countries; but there were complaints that the firm's training for customers in the use of these systems was inadequate. Tony was brought into the firm's training team. He took to the training role quickly and before long was appointed the firm's chief instructor in the use of its military radar systems.
Because of his detailed knowledge of EMI's military radar systems, Tony found no difficulty in explaining their operation, benefits and limitations to the satisfaction of a wide range of major customers, including foreign governments, and he travelled all over the world to provide the training required. At his training sessions he often found questions put to him by foreign English speakers difficult to follow; but usually his lipreading was good enough for him to interpret what they were asking.
However, by the time he had reached his late 40s, Tony was ready to admit to his customers that he was now severely deaf and perhaps should step down from his training role; but they were still keen to have him as their trainer because they trusted his assessment of the strengths and limitations of the company's radar equipment and valued his thoroughness in following up with the company's production departments any faults in the equipment sold to them.
During this period Tony was offered the chance to move out of training into management. He turned it down. He considered that, being severely deaf, he could not be as effective a manager as a hearing person and therefore should not be given responsibility for managing other staff, and particularly younger staff. This view has prompted him to look for personal performance jobs for the rest of his career.
The end of Tony's employment with EMI
At the age of 52 he faced two new challenges. First, he needed relief from his tinnitus, which had become an intense screaming noise. At the suggestion of the RNID he had his ears examined by the Director of the Medical Research Council's Institute of Hearing Research at Nottingham. The Director confirmed the seriousness of his tinnitus but also warned him that he would soon become profoundly deaf. He advised him to apply to his nearest audiology department for his suitability for a multi-channel cochlear implant to be assessed. The tests were carried out and he was found to be suitable; so he applied to have the operation for an implant in his left ear.
Tony also had to decide whether to move to a new location to keep his job. EMI had recently merged with another large electrical engineering firm, Thorn. A new managing director was appointed to reorganise and scale down the merged firm's operations to meet the growing challenge of computer technology. Tony had no expertise in this technology; nevertheless, he was offered the chance to relocate to a different site in Crawley to continue as a trainer on military radar systems.
He did not want to uproot his wife and five children; so he considered daily commuting to Crawley by car; but, on a familiarisation visit to Crawley, he discovered that the noise of the tyres on the M25 reverberated in his head, making his tinnitus unbearable. He decided that he could not cope with the daily car journey to Crawley and opted not to relocate. So a few months later he was made redundant.
Unemployed and profoundly deaf
At first Tony was not discouraged at finding himself without a job. He had no financial incentive to get another job quickly because he had a pension and a substantial redundancy payment from the company, as well as accident and sickness insurance covering his loss of job. His wife had a good job with British Airways; and all five children were working. So for a while he concentrated on selecting sound investments for his newly acquired savings and considered setting up his own business.
However, during this period his hearing deteriorated further and, as predicted, he became profoundly deaf. This meant that in addition to having lost contact with his colleagues at work, he was now losing social contact with friends and local people because it was so hard to communicate with them. This sapped his self-confidence and, after 15 months without a job, he was becoming desperate to return to work.
He went for an interview with his local DEA who suggested that he abandon engineering and retrain for a new career; with his knowledge of mathematics he should get a qualification in basic accounting. Tony accepted this suggestion and embarked on the distance learning courses that the DEA recommended. In nine months of accelerated training he completed two courses and took external exams to qualify in computerised accounts at the first and second level. He found the courses relatively easy and gained a first class pass in both exams. He then began looking for jobs in accounting.
The impact of a cochlear implant on his return to work
By a happy co-incidence at this point his application for a cochlear implant in his left ear was approved, and he had the operation. Two or three months later his speech processing system was switched on.
The cochlear implant had the immediate effect of reducing the level of his tinnitus and soon enabled him to distinguish the sounds of speech accurately; but the implant also had a much broader impact on his whole attitude to life. The contrast between his new situation and his previous experience of relentless tinnitus and profound deafness was astonishing. As Tony put it, "Before [the implant] I was becoming a nervous wreck. I couldn't hear. I hadn't got a job. I had no future to look forward to, no social life. I couldn't really talk to people in shops… I was just gradually losing confidence in myself. Then all of a sudden after this implant the tinnitus had gone down because these noises coming into my head had done something to it…I found that I was getting more and more confident."
It was just at this point that Tony saw a job advertised for a part-time accounts clerk in the Passenger Revenue Department of British Airways(BA). He applied for it and was called for interview. Although he had only had a month to adjust to his cochlear implant, he found that he could hear all the questions put to him and answer them easily. A week after the interview he was offered the job and, at the age of 54, started on a new career.
Tony's progress in his employment at BA
Tony soon discovered that, despite his cochlear implant, his deafness could still cause him problems at work. He needed four weeks training in BA's specialised accounts system before he could start work. On the first day of this training he found that he could not follow what the instructors were saying, when they turned to the blackboard or talked directly to other trainees; so he soon lost the thread of the lesson.
The next day he explained to the staff in the administration department why he could not keep up with the training. He was sent home for a week "while something is sorted out". He thought that this would be the end of his employment with the company; but, to his surprise, he was then supplied with a young but experienced tutor who gave him intensive one-to-one training. This forced Tony to do extra work in his own time to absorb the training, but he did this willingly since the firm was obviously ready to make a special effort to equip him for his new job.
This first job was part-time because Tony needed to keep his mornings free to attend the audiology department of the local hospital for the effectiveness of his cochlear implant to be checked. Over the next three years, however, he progressed within the company with a change of job each year. These changes were:
- a full-time job on input control in the sales department. This required mainly computing skills and proved to be rather monotonous;
- promotion to a more interesting job concerned with revenue accounting for other airlines involved in BA passengers' journeys; this required an understanding of IATA regulations;
- a further promotion to work on disputes with other airlines on what they should be paid for providing flights for BA passengers by assembling a good case for BA's own calculations, in line with IATA regulations. This is a highly specialised job for which Tony received more than three months' one-to-one training.
Tony took the initiative in applying for each of these jobs, after having identified that they were each personal performance jobs that did not require a substantial amount of day-to-day contact with other staff or use of the telephone. In the last of these jobs, however, he has done a good deal of homework out of working hours to master the complexities of the IATA regulations.
Tony's reflections on his employment as a deafened person
Looking back on his employment since he became profoundly deaf, Tony is clear that BA's positive approach to disability, exemplified in their willingness to help him develop his skills through intensive one-to-one training, has been the greatest spur to his advancement in the company.
In addition he feels that he has benefited from the personal approach to work that he developed at EMI. In particular, he has become completely self-reliant, preferring to think things through for himself rather than depend on others for information and help, and likes to immerse himself in the detail of subjects that he is responsible for so that he is fully aware of all the information and issues that might be relevant to his job.