Liam Hicks: ‘My taste of fame with the BBC’

Solarcentury’s Senior Field Service Engineer, Liam Hicks, talks about his day of filming a solar education video for BBC Bitesize and winning a staff award for his efforts.

The BBC approached Solarcentury looking for a solar engineer to interview for an educational video and I was really pleased to be able to do this. It’s been a great opportunity for me to positively represent Solarcentury. I’ve never done anything like this before so it has also been a great personal experience.

Filming took place last winter and at that time we’d just had a heavy downfall of snow across the entire country. That was actually a benefit and I personally felt it added more appeal to the whole experience as it opened up good questions with regards to energy generation on site.

I took the crew through some of my regular tasks including a physical inspection of the site and checklist completion. This involves looking for early stage faults and condition of the grounds on site. I also explained how solar panels work – the types of sunlight that hit the earth and the resulting reaction in the silica crystals of the solar panels that creates a current that can be converted to electricity.

We filmed for about two hours on the day. The film crew were very professional and made it very easy for me to answer the questions they were asking, being in front of the camera for the first time.

After the BBC published the video on the Bitesize website, I shared a link on my LinkedIn profile with colleagues and others in the industry. It was well received and those who saw it gave me some really good feedback.

I think the most rewarding part of the whole experience has been knowing that I am contributing to educating children about solar energy and its importance. It’s a hot topic and the more people who have knowledge of it the better.

A huge surprise for me came at Solarcentury’s December quarterly review where I won first place in a staff award ceremony for the “making solar attractive and accessible” category. This was for my contribution on my personal social media accounts and also for my participation In the BBC bitesize educational film.

It felt great getting positive recognition by senior management – a really proud moment in my career.

If asked, I would 100% do it all again!