Will Thoms

How did you get started in your career and what drew you to Morgan Stanley?

I started as a 10 week intern at Goldman Sachs in the networking vendor connectivity team to experience what it was like to work in a high pressure enterprise environment. After completing my masters, I joined the Morgan Stanley infrastructure Graduate Training Programme as I’d heard positive things about the team working and inclusive culture of the Firm. After completing the programme, I moved into a role in the Enterprise Command Center within the Technology Division as a Major Incident Manager. In 2010 I was given the additional global responsibility as service manager for incident management, in charge of service delivery and continuous improvement. Major incident management consists of running conference calls sending communications to senior management and leading complex technical troubleshoots to restore technical outages that cause major business impact.

How do you manage your disability at work?

I use a screen reader on my PC to read out text on the screen in a spoken voice to access the required applications for my job. I manage a lot of conference calls so I use a switcher box to listen to both the synthetic speech from my computer but also the voices on the conference call at the same time. The third and final item of kit I use is a braille note taking device I use in meetings to read from presentation notes.

How has your employer helped you to do well at your workplace?

In addition to the technical adjustments I mentioned, during the graduate training programme, Morgan Stanley arranged for a mobility specialist to travel with me to New York to familiarise me with the surroundings when traveling into the office from my accommodation. I’m also dyslexic and, upon my request, my manager arranged for an administrative support employee to help proof read my presentations before delivery to catch any spelling errors. These adjustments have been very useful in enabling me to do my job.

Morgan Stanley has been excellent at delivering the equipment and adjustments I’ve asked for throughout my time at the company. Morgan Stanley employees tend to have a very open and willing approach to adaptions.

How would you describe the culture at Morgan Stanley?

Morgan Stanley has a very globally diverse workforce that includes different nationalities, abilities and cultures. These differences build a stronger team and create an excellent working environment.

What advice or top tips would you offer?

Separate you from your disability, don’t be the blind person, but be the person who happens to be blind. Also work hard to be able to articulate your own needs. Use your disability as a strength not a weakness by demonstrating aspects of your disability that you’ve overcome in your CV or application. Showing that you can work even harder than your competition is extremely powerful and it can make you stand out from the pack.