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I was born in Swansea after the second world war, and named John Michael Phillips. I was one of the ‘bulge’ babies, which describes the demographic increase in births that took place in peacetime after World War 2. My father died from a heart attack in 1954 when he was forty four years, when I was just seven years old. Great credit is due to my mother, Gwendoline, who brought me up and my elder sister, Anne, on very little, and managed to make a happy and loving home life for us despite working for all those years. She worked in retail sales for many years maily at the former David Evans department store and from 1970 worked as the manager of the former Tao beauty and electrolysis clinic in Castle St. Swansea. She retired at 70 years and was well loved. My father's story was based on her memories and his army record.

I passed the scholarship for Grammar school but the local education authority was unable to find grammar school places for us all, and so unfortunately those with surnames towards the end of the alphabet were obliged to attend other secondary schools for two years until accommodation was available.
A highlight of those years was a school cruise on the school ship ‘Dunera’, to the Mediterranean and I worked in my summer holidays to earn spending money for the trip. Wasted years or not, I left school with a passable education and was sponsored by the electricity supply industry to train as a professional power engineer, becoming a Graduate Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1969. The education was broad and included Principles of English Law, Economics, and Accountancy. In school I had learned to swim and I count myself fortunate to live on the edge of the Gower coast, overlooking Swansea Bay, where I enjoyed wonderful days on the superb beaches, ‘the Bays’ as we called them, and camping and surfing in my youth.

My first job was running the local power station electrical control room. I enjoyed this for a time but it soon became clear that a revolution was taking place in the power supply industry, as the smaller older plants gave way to large massive constructions with economies of scale. There was consequently a need for fewer staff and I left the industry in the early 1980s with the intention of retraining in the field of education.

Government cuts and freezes on recruitment limited the career options available at the time, but high unemployment had led to an increase in the numbers of specialist careers advisers needed, and so I trained for the field of careers advice, deciding to do so in Nottingham at the then Trent Polytechnic. By this time my widowed mother was elderly and I decided to live at home in Swansea. Local job opportunities in the careers field soon became negligible and so I pursued temporary clerical work in the public sector. I took an evening class leading to a certificate in Supervisory Management in the early 1990s to bring my business skills up to date including IT applications skills.

Fortunately this led to my first ‘big break’ in job opportunities locally for some time, when in 1993 I became a research assistant at the local vocational training funding body, West Wales Training and Enterprise Council; West Wales TEC. My engineering studies had been supplemented by Principles of Economics and so I was able to fit into a labour market research team. I was promoted to research officer and was instrumental in designing and analysing research projects and in compiling and contributing to many reports on the labour market in south west Wales, some of which were published, such as the 'West Wales Annual Labour Market Assessment'. They also included successive ‘Jobmarket’ booklets for west Wales secondary school leavers, and parents, also further education college students, in collaboration with the careers service. The booklets were designed to inform them about the nature of the labour market in their areas and south west Wales and 10,000 were published.

In 2001 the National Assembly for Wales brought the four Welsh TECs under one all-Wales organisation called, ‘Education and Learning Wales - National Council', known as ‘ELWa’. The reorganisation resulted in an offer of voluntary severance to staff in 2002, and as I was then eligible to receive my electricity supply retirement pension, I accepted an enhanced severance package and set up a successful micro business in labour market research, providing labour market information to training providers and the Careers Service in south west Wales.