What's your background?
I started my career as a Purchasing Officer for a medical research company. This was part of an Office Traineeship, so I was working 3 days a week and doing an office management course at TAFE 2 days a week. I loved the role and the training and was offered a full-time position after my year of training. It was an amazing step into the corporate world and I had extremely good mentors. Being only a small company, we had no onsite IT support and I found myself tinkering and becoming the go-to person in the office for anything IT. I performed a few site upgrades of Office versions and printer rollouts and really knew then that I wanted to be in IT.
The majority of my experience has been on the job, moving up to help desk support then onto project management.
My first 'real' IT job was with a major retailer, working on a Windows rollout, in the application packaging area. I loved deployments, I loved translating tech jargon to business-speak and I enjoyed the pace of projects.
Many years later, I am now running a team of nearly 60 people, managing major computing environments and services for a Government agency.
Throughout my whole career, the most valuable thing for me was the open and honest guidance I have received from various mentors. I learned very quickly that if you were willing to ask for help, there is always someone willing to provide it.
What's your job about?
My current areas of responsibility are the management of an ongoing services team responsible for the delivery of end-user services for Defence. We cover several services, including endpoint security, printing services, Microsoft operating system build services, Application Packaging, endpoint management configuration services, Verification and Validation testing and Release Services. We have the most impact on the Defence end-user experience and are responsible for ensuring Defence endpoints remain on current version operating systems.
We have coverage of 6 major environments and support over 150,000 machines and 120,000 users. We have to ensure updates go out to the fleet with no end-user interruption or interaction – so imagine your home pc updates that occur – we do all that in the background and track compliance for each machine.
Did you always know you wanted to work in this field?
I had no idea what career choice I wanted to follow. Nearly 30 years ago when I started this role, it wasn’t very common that IT support was a widely chosen career path. I had two IT subjects at school and never really touched IT apart from the home dial-up modem connection and Napstar! Once I started to get involved in IT, I loved the fact that each issue had a solution.
What is most rewarding about your job?
I have a team of highly professional engineers that are very skilled at what they do. I love seeing them come up with solutions and concepts that are not only making their lives easier but improve customer experience.
I love being able to translate from the technical to the business talk. We provide a lot of reports on a daily basis and it’s not just about providing data but providing the context of what the reporting means.
I also enjoy the forward planning of what we are going to be implementing and how. The struggles that go along with this include ensuring we have enough funding, resourcing capacity and customer buy-in.
What were some of the challenges you faced in getting to where you are now?
There are two sides to every coin.
The challenges of this role are mainly about the pressure that comes with supporting the Australian Defence force. We are responsible for ensuring that they have a reliable and available platform to allow them to do their main role in supporting the warfighter. When you remember it in this context, a small issue that affects 20 people could be a detrimental impact on an active Defence operation. I have to ensure we understand the impact of what we are dealing with and ensuring we have the correct priorities assigned. When we have an issue in the environment, we work 24x7 to remediate it and return services. So often, I have had many weekends interrupted with urgent calls. There is a real sense of satisfaction in remediating these large issues and supporting the team to return of service.
3 pieces of advice you would give women who want to work in your industry?
Think about possible progressions in the role and test yourself against what suits you best. Is it people leadership, technical management, architectural expertise, project management, etc? Each career path has its own requirements from a strengths/personality trait. See what aligns to your own areas of interest and then devise a plan to achieve it. Floating aimlessly and hoping for the best is not a development plan. Take it seriously and it’s ok to try and change tack.