Career
In my time since leaving secondary school, I have had a wide range of paying jobs, Some mundane, some interesting, but all of them were good to have if for nothing else than for the experience.
While in college:-
- Glass collector in ‘The Park’ nightclub in the Parkway, Limerick.
- Petrol station employee, Cashel Service Station.
- Co-op in Wyeth Nutritional in Askeaton,
- Iarnrod Eireann trackworker.
- Dell EMF3 stacker operator on the production line.
- Dell tester of Windows Millenium on the dell gold builds in the PAKO building.
- Co-op in Transitions Optical, Tuam.
- ITD student liaison, on-campus in UL
After I finished college
- I started in Cork for TouchKey technology, designing building and installing touchscreen kiosks. That lasted about 9 months after I was laid off in June 2003!
- After spending the summer unemployed I started in Mediasatellite Ireland again in Cork, progressed internally there to Technical Support Lead, putting up with late wages and other fun and games and resigning in February 2007 after three and a half years putting up with it all.
- Next up was Sentiera Ltd, based in Limerick. There I was an admin and general techie person, streamlining the creation of media player drive images, and installing these in customer environments. After this company ran out of venture capital I was moved back onto the dole queue.
- I am now gainfully employed in Galway for Attachmate NetIQ, a privately owned multinational company that is in the enterprise software business. I am on the Security Support team there, managing some interesting large customers! This is one place I am happy to stay. The people are great, the product works, and business isn’t bad.
It has been a fairly chequered career path to date. I’ve managed to get a bit of most types of roles from the customer facing minimum wage drone through to small company general techie, to being a cog in a large machine.
My next career steps are to complete my CCNA qualifications, and I want to aim for something like RedHat certification and some Windows certs (loath as I am to consider them, they can be useful).