Associate Technical Manager



Week in the Life of Jaskaran Kalsi: Associate Technical Manager Cisco Networking Academy

Jas is the Associate Technical Manager for Europe in Cisco Networking Academy. Here he describes a typical working week.

Monday:

Telephone calls all day!

• Call number 1: Update conference call with my colleagues in Europe.
• Call number 2: Associate Technical Managers conference call to discuss the previous week’s work
• Call number 3: Update conference call with my colleagues within Central and Eastern Europe.
• Call number 4: Update Product Launch Ambassadors conference call for European and Emerging Markets. Here we discuss the take up rate of our new courses (IT Essentials; CCNA Disco & Expo; and CCNP); what problems/issues academies are experiencing and seek resolutions
• Call number 5: Update conference call with Network Development Group (NDG). NDG are in association with the Cisco Networking Academy in providing an excellent service known as NetLAB. NetLAB is a where Academies can host their "real" equipment on the Internet and share their resource with others using NDG’s technologies.

Constantly working on technical issues being raised from Cisco Networking Academies during the course of that day and resolving any issues raised over the weekend.

Tuesday:

As part of our drive to encourage academies to take up the new CCNA courses, our team has developed "Virtual Roadshows". Virtual Roadshows are scheduled WEBEX sessions held for internal Cisco employees working in the field to update their knowledge on our new products. I spend the morning preparing material.

Afternoon: update conference meeting with Cisco colleagues within the UK from the USA on skills competitions

Wednesday:

More calls…

• Technical Mangers/Associate Technical Managers conference call. Here the entire Global Technical Team is present on the call and we update one another of the activities within each of our regions.
• RightNow Training (conf. call hosted from the USA) - training on a support tool which Cisco uses to support queries from within academies.

Thursday:

Throughout the week instructors from CATCs, Regional Academies and Local Academies are contacting me on a whole variety of technical issues. This is the day to day support and running of the programme which I am employed for. It is very interesting to communicate with people from around the globe and you feel a great satisfaction in helping others through problems.

Friday:

Pretty much the end of the working week however, working globally means that sometimes you have to make yourself available on the weekend to take phone calls and answer emails. I tend to dedicated at least an hour on both the Saturday and Sunday to pick up any important emails and respond accordingly. Ha. My work never stops!

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