CCNA grad finds her niche at EDS Canada
Provides server support for Canada Post
| When Jennifer Hurlburt, a native of Yarmouth County, N.S., completed high school, she wasn't sure what career to pursue. Now, however, the 23-year-old Nova Scotian has found her niche working in Ottawa as an advanced systems administrator for EDS Canada, one of the country's leading providers of IT and business processes outsourcing services. "It [CCNA] has allowed me to be comfortable in any environment, especially dealing with servers." |
The turning point for Hurlburt came when she began her third year at Nova Scotia Community College, Burridge Campus, in September 2000. Not only had she completed the Computer Systems and Management support course with honours the previous year, but also she was now taking a demanding course in Computer Networking Technology.
"The Cisco Networking Academy program was made part of the curriculum of the third-year course," recalls Hurlburt. "It was something we had to complete online. It was a big course. Nova Scotia Community College was one of the first Networking Academies in Canada. We were among the lucky ones to have completed that course first."
Lucky, indeed, because the Networking Academy training has proven to be a valuable launchpad for Hurlburt's IT career.
The Networking Academy program teaches students in Canada and around the world the fundamentals of networking. They learn how to design, build and maintain networks capable of supporting national and global organizations. Combining online learning and testing with instructor-led training and hands-on laboratory exercises, students apply what they learn in class by working on actual networks.
After completing her studies, Hurlburt volunteered for a six-week co-op program at EDS Canada in Ottawa. She worked on a second-level desktop team for EDS, supporting its $100-million-a-year IT outsourcing contract with Canada Post Corp. "The networking skills that I acquired allowed me to troubleshoot a lot better any connectivity issues linked to the desktop," says Hurlburt.
Following her co-op program, Hurlburt received a three-week employment contract at EDS Canada, and then was hired full-time, continuing to work on the Canada Post contract. "My CCNA training definitely allowed me to learn the core components and how they work in the environment I was supporting. I didn't actually go into networking, which is the content of the CCNA course, but I worked with it at a higher level, so it allowed me to understand how everything came together."
She has since become an Advanced Systems Administrator working for Enterprise Systems Management on a 2nd level server team. She continues on the Canada Post contract, having moved from desktop support to server support. "We support all the applications that desktop users download from the servers," she says. "There are 170 servers that we maintain 24 hours a day, 365 days a year." Hurlburt works on a team of 17 people, with two team leads and a manager.
The manager, Tom Hamilton, is impressed by how she has grown on the job and appreciates the skills she acquired. "Having a familiarity with network typology and how devices on the network communicate is pretty much essential to working in a server environment," he says.
It has also helped Hurlburt interact knowl-edgeably with EDS colleagues beyond her immediate team. "We do have a network group here that we speak with on a daily basis," she says, "so it allows us to talk at the same level and understand what they're talking about, too."
Hurlburt will soon be taking up a new assignment, an IT outsourcing contract with Harris Bank, beginning May 1st. Once again, she will be focused on server support, and, as before, she credits the Networking Academy program for preparing her. "It has allowed me to be comfortable in any environment, especially dealing with servers."