I've been an IT professional, in at least some facet, since 2005.
I've had the opportunity to touch many different technologies, with a
major focus on network solutions.
I find that I enjoy working in
IT (though I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to others). I get to
build things and solve problems with my mind. I often equate a network
engineer with a mechanical engineer; my work is simply more spacial and
abstract. I enjoy to architect solutions to resolve issues or deliver a
required functionality. To a slightly lesser degree, I also enjoy deep
dive troubleshooting into issues that aren't always straight forward.
Perhaps I feel more free to create when designing a network solution. I
do find that I get board with repetitive or mundane maintenance work or
tasks. I need to be challenged. I much prefer automation over job
security. I guess you could say I'm completely happy working myself out
of a job.
Looking to the future, I'd like to spin my skills,
experience and tenacity into a pre-sales engineer roll with a technology
firm, either hardware or service. The opportunity to work on several
projects with different clients to drive home a sale would be a
rewarding and exciting experience. I've sat on the client side of the
sales table and often felt the sales engineer was the only one worth
trusting. That sense of confidence and assurance is something I can
bring as well.
If you came to this site to research me for an
opportunity, you may be saying, "Jason, this is all well and good, but
you only have a CCNA. Why should we/I hire you...?" To answer this, I
have to admit that I've been a little short sighted. I've grown a bit of
contempt for some industry certifications. It seems that individuals
study to pass an exam rather than to truly expand their knowledge and
understanding. This goes against my curious nature and I feel degrades
the value of these types of certifications; thus, I've chosen to focus
on real world work to grow as a professional. With that said, I
understand certifications are important for a vendor to instill trust in
a client and well known certifications are the means to earn that
trust. I am currently working toward the CCNP-R/S and CCNA/P-DC
certification tracks, expecting to make good headway in the next few
months.
I often wonder that if I was sitting in an interview and
asked to give one word that describes me as an IT professional, what
would it be. I generally come to the same conclusion: deliberate. I say
deliberate mainly because it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine to deploy
technologies that I don't understand. I want to take the time to ensure
that everything happening is understood to a high degree. I feel it
important that tasks and projects are done in the best possible manner,
not to mention enhancing future support.
Something that I've come
to learn is that, even-though IT can be very fun, I have to focus on the
fact that I provide a business with a service. I shouldn't deploy a
technology just because it is something new and cool... there needs to
be a problem to solve or else I'm costing money. I've learned that I
have three basic goals as an IT professional: secure and protect the
infrastructure, generate revenue and/or create and support business
processes. When starting a project, the first question to myself is not
"how do we do this", but "should we do this".
