Education and Employment

In preparation for this moment I have had a successful and diverse career in technology consulting and software development. The origins can be traced back to working in a Tesco warehouse to earn the money to buy one of the first kit computers produced in the UK, from Nascom. I remember unpacking it excitedly behind the settee, the day of my grandfather's funeral. Quite a day.

Earlier dreams of being a marine biologist were crushed by my school and parents. So unsure about a career, I studied Physics at Manchester University, designing a floppy disk drive interface and operating system in my spare time. This did as much as my degree to get me from my first employment, designing radar magnetrons at EEV, to my second with the Digital Systems group of Cambridge Consultants Limited.

For all I didn't know what career to follow, I was always lucky enough to have an uncompromising heart, that helped me follow my interests. The surest thing I've learned about life has been to follow my happiness. I call happiness my compass. It doesn't make life easy in the short term, but in the long run it has paid off for me, and I've seen the results in others of not being able to do this. I trust my heart, and it has never let me down. By pure chance it seems, it guided me to my dream job when I was setting out, and when I was looking for a big change in career twenty years later, my heart won through again. Never in a million years would I have thought of becoming a counsellor, but here I am, loving as much as anything I've ever done.

I spent ten years with CCL, as well as doing my own private consulting, and so have a lot of experience in understanding and meeting the needs of my clients. When my heart was no longer happy there I left to join a tiny software company called i2 Limited. For the next ten years, I enjoyed being part of a company that grew and grew, and has transformed the world of criminal and commercial investigation world-wide, through innovative visualisation and analysis tools. The first PC's in most UK Police forces were bought to run i2's Analyst's Notebook which was the first product I worked on. i2's products went world-wide, and became ubiquitous within law enforcement, and are now used on major investigations in every significant investigative and intelligence organisations.

Later i2 became interested in the potential of enormous commercial databases, and I worked with companies like LexisNexis and Equifax to commercialise the ideas I developed jointly with i2's co-founder Tim Spiers. With that project growing rapidly a separate company was spun off, but an illness caused me to leave i2 in 2002. Visualisation of online data has still not matched the techniques we had developed in 2002, though in 2009 Google showed signs of moving in that direction.

Skills and Experience

I have worked for over 20 years in a wide variety of technical roles on many challenging innovative projects, including design, development and consultancy for small and multi-national clients. Projects ranged from a few hundred pounds to millions, from one-off military prototypes, high reliability dealing desks, to mass market consumer electronics. Mainly in digital electronics and communications, software, internet and web technologies.

I was also involved in marketing, pre-sales, proposal preparation, contracting, recruiting and project management, while in my spare time enjoying running my own business as a profitable hobby. Doing my own book-keeping and VAT, reselling computers mail order, and writing and selling software mail order and over the internet. I'm writing this with the HTML editor I wrote and which sold hundreds of copies.

Without abandoning my love of technology, in 2002 my interests broadened into new areas. Having developed RSI (repetitive strain injury) from over use of computers while at i2, a lengthy period of recuperation allowed me to broaden my interests, to personal and spiritual growth - a classic case of transformation arising out of a period of difficulty and forced change.

In addition to learning a lot about RSI and the importance of body awareness, I began a process of personal psychosynthesis while training as a Psychosynthesis Counsellor. I started seeing clients in 2005 as part of my training, and once qualified, began in private practice from my home in Walthamstow. The reward and enjoyment of supporting people with life-difficulties, help them towards wellbeing, or to achieve their goals, has taken me by surprise. My approach, and the skills necessary for counselling are very different to those needed with technology, which is one reason I enjoy both. So I now enjoy a very rewarding and inspiring range of activities, inter-personal, business and technical.

I am very pleased to be able to offer help to individuals, and businesses of all sizes, and hope that you will find something of value one my services sites. Perhaps we will work together. Please though let me know what you found useful, or if some information was lacking, inaccurate or unhelpful.

Feedback on any aspect of my sites or your experience are very much appreciated, so please leave comments on a blog or email me directly if you prefer. I'd especially like to hear about something you hoped to find but didn't get, or were disappointed with in some way. Appreciations are also welcome of course!

Thank you for visiting,

Mark Hughes
BSc, PG Dip, Member BACP

Football Manager and Ex-Manchester United Player

Whenever Mark Hughes the football manager is in the news, naturally people come here to markhughes.com. To avoid confusion, I am not that Mark Hughes. I have played a lot of football over the years, but these days I prefer figure skating, kung fu and 5rhythms dance. As far as I know, there isn't an official website for Mark Hughes the football manager, but please let me know if I'm wrong so I can link to it here. The best reference I know is: Mark Hughes on WikiPedia.

Reading his Wiki just now I realise we may well be related because he was born near Wrexham, North Wales. During 2007 I researched my family's genealogy back through Liverpool, to Wrexham in the 1850's, and then to Llanarmon DC in the spectacularly beautiful Glynn Ceiriog valley. There, my great x5 grandfather Richard Hughes married Catherine Tudor, and lived at Sarphle farm during the 1700's. I'm also a cousin, once removed, of Andy Burnham MP. My research into the Hughes of Sarphle is published online as A Pedigree and Family Trees for William Cronshaw Hughes

Affiliate Links and Personal Recommendations

I'm a fan of money because I need it to live and I do like not to have to worry about it. So I am happy to take a small commission for a product referral, or if you buy a book through one of my Amazon affiliate links. I won't though do this at the risk of compromising my integrity, or the trust someone places in me by following one of my recommendations.

So you can be sure that everything I recommend has been personally tried, tested, and found to be exceptional value. I will recommend things on merit only, and if their is a commission payable, ok, I'm happy to take it. I won't mind though if you prefer to skip my link and buy direct. That's your choice too.

I hope though, that because I feature commission generating links, that you won't think less of me or the products I'm recommending here or on any of my websites or blogs. I'd like to clarify why you might think that.

I don't practice Multi-Level-Marketing (MLM) or offer Private-Label-Rights (PLR) products as the basis for my business, nor do I condemn people that do. I would use these techniques if I was able to do so ethically and with integrity. It is a fact though, that such schemes are attractive to people who only care about making money, and not the effect of their activity. This makes me sceptical of MLM, PLR, and product referrals and commission schemes such as affiliate links. I assume others will be too.

Generally MLM and PLR schemes are pyramid based, which means people near the top make a lot of money. Those in the middle make some money, doing a lot of work. Those at the bottom never make any money no matter how hard they work. Schemes like this were rife forty years ago, and like chain letters were discredited and outlawed in many countries. The internet has created new legal avenues, access to unprotected jurisdictions, and made them technically cheap, easy and low risk to operate. So the web is awash with such schemes, most of them best avoided because of the effect they have on most participants. Even MLM schemes with valuable products exploit the majority of participants, because no market is infinite. They are valuable for disseminating useful information, but inherently unsustainable when used to generate wealth. Their time is past because they mirror the same attitude that has brought us to the point of trashing our precious planet, and our civilization precariously close to collapse.

To reassure those wise people, who are well aware of this and who may be sceptical of affiliate referral links, I am open and honest about what I do and why. Hence my earlier assurance, which I re-state below.

Everything I recommend or link to has been checked out by myself and found to be exceptional value. I don't recommend anything simply because it earns me money. I value and trust that my reputation will prevail, and that this will come across from what I do and the way I go about it, and how I respond to the people who come into contact with me.

So, I'm not shy of taking affiliate. Some of my links are income generating. The earnings are not my priority, or my reason for placing those links. My priority is giving value to others, because I am already rich in other ways. I already have enough money for myself, but any additional income gives me more freedom to share, and the ability to give more away free. So all earning links are chosen first on the basis of value to others. Trust, reliability and quality is essential to my personal integrity, and to the viability of my long term business. I will not place links purely to generate income, and I don't recommend, offer, or sell anything that I haven't tried and got exceptional value from myself. This is also why I don't have any paid advertising on my sites. When I do it will only be because I've vetted the quality of the offers.

My aim is to either help you or your business in person, or to provide you with practical, reliable and useful information on my websites, blogs and other media. Everything can be reached via this site, so follow the links of interest.