Due to the company growth and further company acquisitions, our team also had to grow which meant my role evolved. In addition to my technical work I also started to manage Helpdesk staff. Currently we stand at 8 engineers where 5 report into me.My technical role developed into a more senior role where I’m in charge of company acquisitions, compliance projects and future proofing our infrastructure. Company acquisitions still a yearly occurrence and this is how our supported users have grown from 350 to just over 1000 with offices in EMEA, US and Asia.With this growth I also had to implement changes to our Helpdesk system and hire members of staff in order to support our offices. This led me to implement automation on our Helpdesk in order to save as much time as possible on manual work and the introduction of a new Knowledge Base system in order to deliver great customer service and quick resolution of calls.The development of my team is also at the forefront of my day to day and as part of their development I encourage and review potential career paths that are relevant to them and to what we do. Since the Covid pandemic hit in March 2020, I moved on to a more of a supporting role for the helpdesk engineers by supporting the BAU requests when needed and working with junior engineers on delivering compliance and company acquisition projects by mentoring them and by giving them the ability to come up and deliver their own solutions.

I was brought in as a Senior Network Engineer to improve on the existing infrastructure for 3 Halma Plc subsidiaries. The role had a sense of a small start-up which allowed me to fine tune previous skills and develop new ones.I was initially brought in as a 3rd line infrastructure engineer and project delivery. In addition to BAU request I took on a hardware replacement project which I led and delivered. This consisted in replacing all servers, network switches and wireless hardware with Enterprise level solutions. As part of this replacement program I also took on the responsibility to migrate roles from older 2003 & 2008 Windows Servers to newer versions in order to comply with security policies.Towards the end of this role I also worked on delivering a company merger project. This involved integrating the IT systems from our new Spanish office into our existing infrastructure with minimum disruption. During this time, I worked with and built the relationship with 3rd party hardware providers and integrated existing computers and systems with our existing infrastructure.

As with the last job role, there was a transition period of roughly 6 months where I was already performing Senior Network Engineer tasks where I carried out a Windows Network Refresh for one of our clients. I was the lead engineer on this project and my company migrated their old 2003 Standard Servers to a virtualised Windows Server 2012 R2 environment; This project first consisted in migrating their On-Premise Exchange environment to Office 365 by performing a Hyrbid migration; Once this task had been performed I was then able to migrate their remaining servers to the new host environment. The base of this network refresh was done using VMWare in a cluster environment and this also introduced me to Veeam On-Site and Cloud backups.As with any Senior role, I was also part of the 3rd line escalation team where I was one of the last point of contacts for Care; These would cover anything from Windows PCs issues to Server, Exchange and Network Issues where I would have to resolve ad document the resolution of the issue at hand.Solidified my networking skills by creating and maintaining client's sites with VLANs as well as connecting their branch offices with site to site VPN connections. My current duties mainly consist of being an escalation point at Care and working towards improving our clients IT system to suit their need by working closely with them and migrating their system.

This role introduced a couple of extra responsibilities at the beginning; On top of the Helpdesk calls, I started going out to clients sites to perform regular maintenance visits. These callouts consisted of setting up Windows computers & the troubleshoot of mainly Windows & Apple Mac devices. I progressed within this role and was then often asked to troubleshoot Windows Server & Exchange issues as well as Networking Issues; This evolved later on and I started migrating clients SBS servers to either Essentials or Office 365 depending on their needs. My Networking skills also progressed and I started taking on configuration and setting up of firewalls for our clients.Towards the end of this role I was involved in a project where I support the Senior Engineer where we initially migrated a 300+ client with branches in different continents to Office 365; This migration also coincided with the merging of 3 separate companies with our client and the creation of a new Domain Network. We had to bring over and consolidate their systems with our client's network and domain. This is when I was first introduced to virtualisation and the use of Hyper-V as well as VMWare.

My initial duties were to answer the phones, log the issue into our ticketing system and perform some basic troubleshooting steps. If unsuccessful at resolving the problem I would then escalate the call to a senior engineer. When performing this role I expanded my experience with Windows Desktop clients and was introduced to Windows Server & Exchange troubleshooting. Towards the end of this role I started performing 2nd line tasks and my skills broadened to include network support and troubleshooting as well as creating & monitoring our client's backup solution.

This role started off as me covering Helpdesk positions on a holiday cover basis for companies such as BMW, Honda & Toyota. This role lasted 6 months where I then was offered a permanent role at BMW, where I stayed for over a year. My duties at BMW were of a 1st and 2nd line support engineer, which included logging calls, diagnosing, troubleshooting, resolving the issue and document the solution; Also consisted of call escalation when necessary.

I was brought in after colleague to help with a project Ultima had just taken on. My duties were to prep the computers to be sent out for our field engineers to setup at a major retailers HQ. This role lasted 8/9 months and I was soon moved over to another project where I had a more hands on experience. At this point Ultima had just taken on a contract with another major retailer to replace & upgrade their server and tills. There were multiple teams of two engineers and each team was given stores to go to to do the upgrades. I gained a lot of customer facing experience as well as responsibility due to the time constraint we had on a daily basis as the store had to be up and running before it opened the next day. This role latest 8/9 months and during this time I travelled the whole of the UK and visited 100+ stores giving me customer facing experience.

My duties here consisted of logging calls and helping senior staff with their roles. Most of the problems were related with Windows and Office applications. This was a part time role that I took on whilst studying at Thames Valley University.