25 years at WANO

By Tellervo Taipale, QA and Communications Manager, WANO Paris Centre

For this edition of Inside WANO, we spoke to one of WANO's longest-serving employees, Frédéric Pain. As Director of Information for Systems & Security and General Services at WANO Paris Centre, he has overseen the implementation of an Information System flexible yet secure enough to suit the evolving business needs of modern users. In January this year, Frédéric celebrated an impressive milestone - 25 years as an employee of Paris Centre.

Frédéric himself admits it took some time to become accustomed to the international atmosphere at WANO. As a French man brought up in the countryside, he had never experienced the global way of working before, and it took him a while to adjust. The official language in Paris Centre is English, which did not make communicating easy for Frédéric as a native French speaker. He also did not yet have a comprehensive understanding of the nuclear industry. So he had to learn fast.

The world of Information Systems was also markedly different. In the early 1990s, emails were not widely used as a form of communication, and the Internet was still in its infancy. WANO used a telefax system to distribute information to colleagues, whilst employees relied on a modem to connect with other organisations in the nuclear industry.

Now, things have changed, both for Frédéric and WANO Paris Centre.

There have been huge technological developments since Frédéric joined all those years ago. First came the introduction of the desktop computer. Soon databases, websites, software and the ubiquitous Cloud became commonplace.

Thanks in no small part to Frédéric, Paris Centre's Information Systems and security now meet the demands of mobile users and support virtualisation. He has also contributed to key software development projects for Operating Experience (OE), Performance Indicators (PI) and Peer Review (PR) programmes.

Even his language skills have improved vastly – after working with more than 250 colleagues in the course of his career, he has been inspired to study a variety of foreign languages. In fact, he takes great pride in his ability to greet his colleagues in their mother tongues every morning.