A quick timeline for you:
- April 2015 – Change job from BMS (as Infrastructure Manager) to Magna Interiors (IT Support Analyst)
- 31st August 2015 – Magna Interiors acquired by Grupo Antolin
- November 2015 – Personal decision made to start looking for a different job – bring on the LinkedIn messages/ Recruiter calls!
- 7th December 2015 – Job Offer from Dot Net IT (as Infrastructure Technician) – closer to home, slightly different role
- 4th January 2016 – Day 1 at Dot Net IT, have a good feeling about this one.
- 1st June 2016 – Surprise announcement of Epicor’s acquisition of Dot Net IT
- 6th November 2016 – Finally getting around to writing this post.
The statistics for you:
- 1 year 6 months 20 days since last day at BMS
- 4 different companies since then (due to takeovers)
- 3 different job titles in that time
- 1 car, 1 house, 1 wife, 1 cat
Is there a point to all this:
Yes, I have been mulling these statistics for a little while now.The last 18 months have been interesting to say the least!
Whilst the Magna role didn’t quite work out how I hoped, it did give me some vital real world experience, as did my time at BMS. In fact putting those 2 roles together, with a little of my Uni/IBM life on top and you’re close to how I started this year when I joined Dot Net.
The big change for me this year was moving from internal IT (supporting the company you work for) to external IT (supporting customers of the company you work for). And initially this is where all my apprehensions lied. Over time I have begun to face my fears and anxiety when it comes to dealing with people with problems. Normally I just went around fixing servers and systems, not really dealing with the end user so much. Now I feel much more competent at dealing with the people, not just the computer.
On top of that I’ve had the opportunity to develop my application installation and support skills, not just ERP, but with VMWare, Hyper-V, Windows Server, SQL Server, IIS, Veeam, SharePoint (to name a few). I also got back to some proper hardware installation work, similar to my IBM days, although this time primarily Dell enterprise level hardware, with some HP.
Another major change for me, kind of an aside the customer facing work, is the travelling around. My current base office is 1.3 miles from home, if it wasn’t for the big hill I would walk it! So if I’m based almost from my own back garden how have I put so many miles on so many vehicles… wait for it… more statistics:
- 15 Customer locations
- 2 Company locations
- 9 Vehicles
- lots of miles (haven’t counted due to multiple vehicles!)
It has been a huge personal achievement for me this year to come out of my shell, leave the house at 5am, drive to a random part of the country and introduce myself as the bloke that’s going to make your systems work. Whether that’s hardware, applications, ERP or just a meeting to plan it all in, I’ve done it all this year!
So back to my original title for this rather long post.
It has been a year of two halves… it started out assisting companies with their hardware and software needs; developing an end to end solution including design, purchasing, installation, training and long term maintenance. The second half has been less of that and more ERP installation, 3rd-line tech support, high-value projects, high-risk projects and everyone’s favorite; high priority/escalated issues. Yes now I can finally call myself a Technical Consultant, and it means I get anyone and everyone with performance issues, installation issues, and additional installs!
I won’t bore you all with the details of the day job, but suffice to say I cover a lots of different aspects of technical work across many customers and many industries, it sure does exercise the brain!
To come back to an earlier bullet point above, in all the time that I’ve had a couple of jobs and been to a few different places there’s one thing that has stayed the same, and that is home! Nothing beats coming home to the wife after a long hard slog on the M40 or when I left the office 7 minutes ago with no traffic. The reason I put that in the list is because no matter what I do, where I am one day to the next or who I’m working for and with, I will always need and want my home comforts. No words I put on here can thank Hannah enough for putting up with me, but I am forever grateful.
Thanks for reading, I’m hoping 2017 will be just as exciting