Certification - July 2008 - (Page 29)

For instance, someone may not have Cisco router experience listed on a resume, but he or she may have other router experience. “You may find out when he gets home, he has a Cisco router, and on weekends he likes to play with it,” Ahlberg said. “On the sideline, he’s set up Cisco routers for other people, but he didn’t put it on his resume because it’s not really work-oriented.” To Be Certiﬁed or Not? There’s a lot of value in getting certified, but what Ahlberg seeks out is the post-certification experience. This comes as a result of his experience working with people right out of college who were newly certified. “They didn’t know anything because they lacked the real-world experience,” he said. The best value in certified candidates is their experiences in realworld environments because they then can leverage that learning with their technical knowledge. The business model of a company typically determines whether the company will adopt vendor-neutral or vendor-specific certifications. Ahlberg explained that several managed service providers adopt vendor-specific certifications depending on two criteria: what clients deal with and what’s efficient for the company to support. Waident’s business model, on the other hand, makes it beneficial to deal with vendor-neutral certifications since it supports a wide range of products, including HP, Dell and Mac. Ahlberg doesn’t view obtaining a certification as an end goal, though. He sits down with employees to determine which classes they can take that would be pertinent to their jobs, even if obtaining the certification takes a few years. “There’s a whole bunch of companies that need somebody certified [immediately],” Ahlberg said. “It’s a ‘to do.’ In my world, it’s a ‘to think.’” Training New Hires Though new hires don’t go through an extensive training process at Waident, Ahlberg said it’s important to teach them about the company’s two main applications. The first is what he calls “people support,” the tool that enables employees to communicate with and update each other on support requests and any projects they’re working on. The second is what he refers to as “the technology management tool” that monitors the servers and shows the blog files, modems and other things managing the technology. New hires are additionally given a crash course on the company’s approach to interacting with customers. For instance, one of the first things they are required to say when communicating with clients is, “I’m here to help you. When would you like me to work on this?” Ahlberg said that unlike the usual help-desk experience of expecting customers to drop whatever they’re doing, Waident employees work around their customers’ schedules. “Half the stuff we do is on what I call ‘my time,’” he said. But the interaction with the customer doesn’t end with the completion of the job. Employees are to e-mail customers exactly what they did, how they did it and ask them whether or not the problem is solved. “We want to know that the [client] is happy,” Ahlberg said. In fact, if it doesn’t hear back, the company has established a process that automatically sends e-mails to customers every 12 hours to check in with them and ensure their technology-related problem is solved. “It’s important for us to know [the task is done] and the client is happy with it rather than make assumptions and find out a month later that it has never worked,” Ahlberg said. He likens the trainee routine to a time in college when he waited tables and had to shadow another waiter for a week to observe his interactions with customers. Evaluating Recent Graduates It would be a first if Waident Technology Solutions hired someone fresh out of college. “That concept is on our radar, and it’s nothing we shy away from,” Ahlberg said. “We’ve just never [had] the opportunity to do that.” The company is eager to pursue this avenue because of what it perceives as an advantage: Ahlberg’s assumption that recent graduates haven’t acquired any bad technology habits. “No college tells them that if anyone calls for help to say, ‘I’m too busy doing technology stuff,’” Ahlberg said. A lack of sufficient experience shouldn’t deter a candidate’s chance of landing the job, Ahlberg said, because he can provide help for that. 8 – Deanna Hartley, dhartley@certmag.com July 2008 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE 29

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification - July 2008

Certification - July 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data System Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Academic Connection Look Ahead Troubleshooting Testing Your Foot in the Door: Certification at the Entry Level Analyzing the Societal Effects of YouTube Interface Spread the Knowledge: Becoming an IT Trainer Inside Certification Ad Index What We Like Endtag

Certification - July 2008

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