Hello,
It seems my timeline will have me moving to the UK this summer in June or July. I've begun to dig into job search sites, recruitment sites, and reading into threads on here and in other places.
I feel like I'm starting to get a handle on searching for jobs there and how the IT sector works in comparison to here but there's a lot to get accustomed to.
I'm coming from a history of client/end-user facing support roles. I have 11 years of experience in which the bulk of that was spent in onsite hardware support, configuration, and disaster recovery roles. We label the job titles here as field service, field engineer, onsite service technician, etc.
- My first role was with Sun Microsystems supporting disk storage arrays and assisting with related Veritas inquiries. I was basically in a tier 3 help desk role there. I worked in this role for about 2 years
- Following that I worked for a major international contractor as a field engineer performing onsite service for Dell/EMC 4 hour, NBD, and SBD service contracts, IBM 4 hour, NBD, and SBD, contracts, and doing bulk onsite hardware repairs for government customers with Dell, Apple, Sony, and Lenovo workstations and laptops. I also occasionally did deployment projects and upgrades when I was given a work order for one. I worked in that role for just about 4 years
- Following that I got a job offer for the current role I have which I've held for the last 6 years going on 7. I work for a third party hardware warranty provider doing on-site hardware repair, disaster recovery, and configuration support. I am also the first point of contact for customer support when a service ticket gets logged and the first to reach out to the customer to provide analysis and troubleshooting of their issue.
If it's something way over my head, such as hunting down configuration issues and isolating whether there is a hardware or software issue on something like an enterprise HP-UX system, I send it off to an internal subject matter expert within our company. But for the most part, I request logs or log in remotely and find out what the issue is, develop an action plan, grab some parts if needed, and make my way to the site to work with the customer and get them back up and running.
The variety of hardware and OS's that I see on a daily basis is huge. I literally work with anything made in the past 10-15 years and with any OS out there. This would be restricted to mid-range and enterprise servers and storage systems.
I'm really hoping to make a somewhat easy transition into a role where I can provide client services again, but finding onsite service related jobs is a bit tough. Here are a few examples of companies here in the states that provide the types of services I am referring to in my above roles:
I dislike the idea of resorting to an office environment doing something menial and repetitive like System/SAN/Network administration but if that is all I can find at first I could endure. I'm hoping to find something kind of in-line with my work history since I really do excel at and enjoy this line of work. I could also easily be happy in a role where I am acting as a SME for a specific line of products (Tier 3 support). I am well versed in almost any Fibre or iSCSI storage system on the market and enjoy working with those types of system the most, closely followed by blade servers and ESXi systems.
Definitely taking a long shot here but if anyone in IT has any suggestions for companies that may provide similar services to what I've been doing in the past, I am all ears. I've found a few, but most seem to be down in London and it appears that they rarely hire their own FE's, so I'm assuming they send contracted parts monkeys onsite with a cellphone duct-taped to their heads..
