The mission of the Level Up Project is to mobilize, curate and organize critical technology career resources and make them universally accessible and useful. Our goal is to “level up” the careers of technology professionals by focusing on the creation and curation of physical and virtual mentorship resources and delivering them through online and in-person events as well as publicly available knowledge bases. We’re dedicated to the idea of delivering distributed mentorship in order to make a real impact on people’s lives by helping them advance their careers.

As Infrastructure Officer my responsibilities include:• To help build and maintain all technical infrastructure for Commercial Group• Providing advanced server and desktop technical support• Pro-active management, monitoring and deployment of technology• Responsible for the management and deployment of hardware infrastructure• Maintaining network performance by performing network monitoring and analysis, and performance tuning.• Active directory and Exchange server administration• Troubleshooting network problems• Troubleshoot outages• Plan and Test configuration changes• Automate configuration updates and backup • Consulting with Professional Services division to specify systems requirements and design solutions• ISO 27001 Accreditation and Disaster Recover/BCP Planning As Application Specialist my responsibilities include:• Provide first level support on all Business Systems issues• Investigate and resolve application functionality related issues• Provide assistance to business users in the effective use of applications and information technology• Analyse data contained in the corporate databases and identify data integrity issues with existing solutions• Participate in weekly Helpdesk review meetings with the Business Systems/Internal IT• Actively participate in IT Projects

In my role as 3rd line engineer I am responsible for maintaining tickets and ensuring they are kept up to date and resolved within the SLA. I am required to take ownership of complex issues and being the primary customer liaison ensuring they are updated and satisfied throughout the lifecycle of the problem. Parts of my role allow me to mentor other team members sharing information and knowledge ensuring there is a consistent resolution from all of the team. When required I also assist with workshop builds, internal IT and attend customer sites to resolve underlying issues. Currently I am taking part of the Green Angels innovative allowing me to implement a project to provide back to the workforce and the local community.

The primary purpose of my role was to provide 3rd line support to both external and internal customers, co-ordinate the activities of the Service Desk team whilst at the same time ensuring all incidents are captured and targeted for resolution within SLA ensuring that all escalations and complaints are responded to and escalated to the IT Service Manager in a timely manner. The services we supplied covered a range of solutions offered including IBM (Series i and Series X), Microsoft, Cisco and HP. Customer support is telephone based with the occasional opportunity to take part in onsite engineering or consultancy.

I accepted this recent role to further my skill set in the Microsoft business suite, I worked on a SharePoint and Dynamics AX upgrade. This consequently spawned projects where I need to look at the underlying architecture such as the file server and WAN between the sites. I was also involved in our office move where I am writing proposals for migrating our remote office to Microsoft Lync to reduce the need for an onsite PBX. My daily responsibilities included daily checks, backup rotation and checks, helpdesk escalation, infrastructure and client maintenance, end user training via video packages and project management with implementation across teams. I was also involved in the patching regime using WSUS to ensure the systems are up to date outside of core business hours.

In this role I was part of a small team that managed the IT infrastructure and delivered support to over 250 staff across 3 sites for two companies within the Cello Group. My larger projects included creation of an image deployment system for the Apple Mac’s, which heavily reduced our deployment time from one working day to an automated process taking less than an hour. I was also involved in the rollout of our new wide area network and architecting the new Cisco Meraki switches, routers, firewalls and wireless access points. I then deployed these into the environment which increased network throughput and resiliency. As part of another major project, I designed a high throughput virtual environment that could burst to the customer requirements to process millions of records within the space of a working day. This called for me to advise on a SAN that was capable of the requirements and ensure the network could handle the required production bandwidth and replication across our WAN. In summary, my daily responsibilities included helpdesk support, hardware and software installation, machine rebuilds, backup checks, end user training and implementation of major projects to enhance the IT infrastructure.

In this role I was part of a diverse team that supported numerous contracts across a central services model working to ITIL and ISO 20000 standards covering most of the UK. In my time in this role I was involved in delivering projects for the company such as a new remote support system and a major project to deliver an Apple Mac environment. This had to cater for the current running systems and planning for the new system lifecycle from purchasing to end user deployment. In order to successfully implement the requirements and fulfill this project I arranged to attend the relevant training courses, which has led to my additional certifications. This system was also designed in mind with another project I was involved with for a SCCM deployment solution so it would match the Windows infrastructure. This enhanced my relationship with the customer and I worked with them on a mobile device management solution for iOS and other devices such as Android and Microsoft phones. Other projects I was involved with were updates and rollouts of VMware Esx and Hyper-V within a secure environment. This also led onto scoping out an upgrade for a Citrix Metaframe XP farm to either a new XenApp enviroment or RemoteApp enviroment depending on the customer end requirements. On a daily basis I managed Active Directory, Exchange and ISA Firewalls to ensure they were healthy and that relevant changes were performed. I also configured and maintained products that helped manage the infrastructures such as Citrix, Websense, Bomgar, System Centre Operations Manager. I produced and analysed monthly reports of usage statistics on these products along with file system availability and made recommendations to enhance and protect the infrastructure. Within our incident logging system RMS we had alerts raised by HP System Insight Manger and Dell OpenManage where I had to verify the hardware notifications and progress these to a fixed status.

In this role I was part of the application support engineer team supporting several forces with our software package. During this role I designed and implemented a new terminal server environment that allowed secure remote access to 3 remote data centers for one secure client. This took into account the strict policies implied by the client and also our security mangers best practices. My responsibilities in this role included performing checks on an array of systems with different environments such as UNIX and Windows. I was also required to locate issues within the software by liaising with the users and fault finding issues they were experiencing. If any errors were not resolved I was required to check the relevant error logs and interfaces used. I also investigated hardware related incidents such as failed disks and servers. This also sometimes led onto initial investigation of the network devices such as Cisco and Dell by logging onto the device and checking the ports and configuration. I also performed additional activities to support the forces such as Anti-Virus updates using packages like Trend Server Protect and Microsoft Forefront security or applying patches with Altiris.

In this role I was involved in answering calls and escalating them to the correct level. If possible, I supplied a first time fix and chased up the call to ensure the customer was satisfied. I also had to make sure myself and my team were working to the desired targets and that no calls breached their target time. At this level I was also involved in the Daily Checks and the Reboot Schedule to further my understanding of what the team offered to our customers.

I started as a part time sales assistant whilst I was studying and when I finished college I took on a permanent role and soon I was promoted to a senior sales assistant. Within a few months an opportunity arose for a deputy manager position which I successfully secured. My rapid progression with this company proves my ability and dedication. My duties included ensuring the store ran smoothly on a daily basis. To achieve this I had to ensure that deliveries were processed and checked, all marketing was completed and that all staff were performance managed and trained. During my time as deputy manager and an acting store manager I had to recruit staff myself by holding interviews where I had to assess their ability. This was a great opportunity for me to expand on my people skills and communication skills. To progress in my role I completed the MELP (Management Entry Level Programme) where I had to take a section to be in charge of and create a positive impact on that department. During this course I had to write training material and also give a formal presentation to local area managers and the training department at head office, which enhanced my presentation skills.