Our Head of Support in the UK, Ryan Brazell, describes his Conosco career journey…
Many people start their working careers knowing what their goals are and the steps they need to take to achieve them. Often this process involves assembling relevant experience to help move the person in the right direction. But this is not how everyone’s journey develops…
For me, IT was always a hobby, and often a necessity to complete day-to-day tasks. Although I used my IT skills daily for studying, helping my family, or gaming in my spare time, I never saw it as a career. I knew I would be using computers in whatever career path I chose to follow and that technology would play an important role, but I never imagined that I would one day be managing an IT support team.
While at college, I worked in food retail and worked my way through internal staff training programs to become a business manager, and later a divisional retail staff trainer. This was a great opportunity to develop my customer service skills.
In 2011, I decided that I needed a new challenge and I moved to London to look for a job in the IT sector. I saw that Conosco were advertising for a Junior Projects Engineer. I applied and I was interviewed the same day. I thought the company looked promising, the location was not too far from home. Needless to say, I was very happy when they offered me the position the next day.
When I started at Conosco in the projects team, my typical day-to-day tasks included building, setting up and completing the handover of new systems to our clients. It was the perfect opportunity to develop my IT knowledge through exposure to multiple systems, and to further develop customer relations when meeting with our clients.
While in the projects team, I was eager to develop my skills further and wanted to help with the queries and questions that our clients would ask me. At the time, I would pass these queries on to our dedicated support team members, but I wanted to be more involved with the daily support of our clients, determining why problems can occur and how they can be resolved.
With the support of my Projects Team Leader and the Head of Support, I decided to move into a support-based role, working with clients both remotely and at their offices. The senior support engineers and the rest of the support team explained the processes and provided documentation for the clients we support. I loved the exposure and new challenges I faced. Of course, there were many things I did not know at first, but my experienced and knowledgeable colleagues were very willing to help me learn. At the same time, I was able to pass on my own knowledge (gleaned by installing new systems when I was part of the projects team) to them. I felt like I was an essential part of the team, and I knew I had found where I wanted to be.
Progression in my career is essential for me, and I came to a point where I wanted to train the support team and demonstrate the client knowledge I had learned over the years. The opportunity to move into a team leader role emerged, followed by an opportunity to move into support management as the Head of UK Support, which is my current role. As a member of the Conosco Leadership Team (CLT), I am now responsible for not only the support engineers, but also for helping define the processes the company follows and the strategic direction we take.
In just a few years, I have been given the opportunity to learn new skills and refine my existing skills to put them to good use within the company. Of course, there have been challenges along the way, but I’m grateful to still be learning and growing as I continue my Conosco journey.