Jen: My name is Jen. Thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate your time. Today Jinesh is not allowed to ask any questions because he knows you and has organised the meeting. So, it looks like it's just left to me. I don't know where the rest of our team is, but you know how team projects tend to go!
Steve: I very much do.
Jen: Thanks for joining us. I'll just kick on; I don't want to waste your time. We've got probably like eight questions to run through if that's OK with you.
Steve: Yep.
Jen: Lovely. Thank you. Steve, can I ask what sort of IT roll you're in?
Steve: So, I am a help desk and computer technician for a school.
Jen: What kind of people do you interact with on the daily basis?
Steve: So, it is a probably an equal mix of students and teachers, each with their own computer problems and parents who need remote assistance to get into our portals.
Jen: So, do you interact with any other IT professionals where you are usually?
Steve: Just our providers, so contacting manufacturers and all that sort of stuff and getting their help when things don't work.
Jen: And where do you spend most your time at work? Were you able to work remotely during COVID?
Steve: Working remotely was pretty easy because there's no one on site, there wasn't a lot of stuff on site to manage, so it was mostly remote work. But now that we're on site, remote works only really possible when you're sick, stuff like that. Usually we’re on site.
Jen: I'm guessing you have kids coming to you with laptops and things like that they need help with?
Steve: Yeah, all the students here.
Jen: I've got two of them. They keep breaking their own (laptops). Why did you choose to focus on this particular area of IT? Do you see yourself moving into any other areas?
Steve: So, like, it's a very sort of broad area and I guess I'm in it mostly because it's just something that I could help people with. I'm experienced in programming and game design and all that sort of stuff and it's difficult to get this sort of off the ground. But I really enjoy. it and helping people. So that's kind of why I'm in that position right now. In the future, I can see potentially specialising in more sort of stuff because, there's a lot of different roles in infrastructure we have at the college and management definitely seems to be interested in getting people to be specialists in different areas.
Jen: Are they going to provide you with training opportunities and things like that to broaden your skills?
Steve: Eventually, that's the plan. I know before my time, there was a lot of training opportunities. The person that I effectively replaced had gone on several work paid trips to learn different systems here.
Jen: What do you think your area of work will be like in 15 year’s time? Like, do you see any major changes or hurdles?
Steve: That's difficult for schools because I feel like, at least when it comes to the end user hardware we’re kind of as far as you're going to go. Like minus further integration with AI, which really for us is just another endpoint to integrate. I don't see it going that far.
Jen: Because it works, right?
Steve: Yeah, and you complicate it more. The kids are going to struggle. Like we went to iPads because computers were too complicated. Now we're going back to computers because iPads can't do enough. So, I think, yeah, well, my time in high school, we didn't have anything and the second I left, everyone got iPads. And the second I started work here, we swapped to laptops.
Jen: So, we had one computer in the hallway when I was in year six in primary school. And you had to block out 15 minutes chunks of time to use it. So, I can understand that.
Steve: Yeah, I think we definitely are as far as at least student and teacher endpoints are going to go. But in the back end there's a lot. AI definitely seems to be the way forward, mostly just 'cause. It automates things. It's not, it's not this catch-all, but it automates so much you can automate artwork, automate a lot of the security stuff which is where it's probably going to be needed most.
Jen: That sorta machine learning type stuff.
Steve: Yeah.
Jen: What does an average day look like for you?
Steve: So typically I rock up to work. We have a set of routine tasks we do every morning, so that's checking nothing’s died overnight, the Wi-Fi is working, the emails working Microsoft is working, then after that it's usually responding to tickets that have any updates. Um, checking any devices that have been repaired by the repair technician and then just responding to tickets and assistance as it comes through. We do sometimes have projects that's usually over the holidays and stuff, so that might be replacing access points or replacing ups’s and other bits of vital infrastructure.
Jen: I'm guessing for a ticketing system you use something like JIRA?
Steve: We use Manage Engine by Zoho ‘cause that contains a whole database and financial side and all that we can implement together. I know they've got just Service Desk now or something they call it but I think we use this one 'cause it's got the whole database integration and the previous manager used to use it for finance as well.
Jen: Thanks, Steve. We've only got one more question for you, so it's going to be pretty quickly done. The last question is how do you continue your professional development? And I already sort of actually talked asked you this about funding and things like that, but do you have any side projects that you're running with it the moment?
Steve: So in regards to like work-wise, not much but we’ll see when they you know, we've got a lot of systems that the previous manager kind of took his knowledge with him or didn't actually teach anyone else. So, it's definitely something I want to spread to all of us. So once we've got time 'cause, it's just been sort of project and then bottleneck after bottleneck we’ll start to spread out to that. Otherwise, personally I'm doing more back to the game development side, working on my own solo stuff. I do still run a company that does game development. And I've got a client project that I need to work on that I'm waiting for them to approve the quote. But other that's about sort of all that I'm doing personal development-wise. I’m sort of waiting on an opportunity for work and working on sort of tangential stuff 'cause I do provide assistance to the school 'cause they're looking at looking into game development stuff for the kids, which is good 'cause I've got a lot of industry contacts that we can try and leverage, but they need to sort of understand how that works first before we can leverage forwards.
Jen: It sounds like you've managed to make the best of both worlds with you career path. having this side gig as well.
Steve: If it made a decent amount of money, I'd say so.
Jen: You’d do it permanently, yeah.
Steve: Oh yeah.
Jen: Look, that’s the end of our questions Steve. Once again, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you coming along and answering this for us and putting your face on screen. It's really going to help us out with the assignment.
Steve: No it’s all good. I’m always happy to help out.
Jen: Thanks very much, nice to meet you.
Steve: And you have a great evening.
Jen: You too. Bye.