NOC Operator Review

The placement has been a bit of a roller-coaster! It was really fun at first to be working in such a high tech facility such as the NOC surrounded by experienced people to help you along, then the entire NOC minus the interns was made redundant and the NOC Interns reported remotely to the NOC in Canada. We were moved to a new room under our new manager who has been brilliant for aiding our personal development and has helped us make the most out of our situation. I have enjoyed working at Blackberry and would urge others to apply to do the same!

Working in the NOC I have communicated to many teams in the organisation, this has allowed me to expand my professional network. I think we were held in high regard by people who the NOC worked with such as Data Center technicians and Service engineering teams, however outside of Global Technology Services not a lot of people knew how the NPC worked.

Both sides of management were fantastic, firstly my Team Lead and Duty Manager were always there to guide me and help me along whenever I needed help and also provided opportunities to expand my knowledge. Post Redundancy our new manager focused on personal development and has helped me improve and plan out where I want to go in my career, something I had not really thought about in too much depth before!

There are times in the NOC where you wont be able to breath due to the amount of work but then at the same time there are also times where there is nothing to do because nothing is happening. You can undertake personal project work in these times but sometimes it can be pretty boring.

before the redundancies I was monitoring Email, Cloud and Enterprise services in EMEA with people in my team to back me up if things went rough, post redundancy I now monitor these services Globally so I have a lot of responsibility to ensure these services are in good health to prevent impact to end user/customers.

On the job I have developed a working knowledge of Linix and Windows Servers, network infrastructure troubleshooting and cloud technologies. In my own time at work I have managed to teach myself about topics such as virtualization and data center architecture which will aid me greatly in my final year project, as well as learning other things such as a few programming languages.

Work within my shift team was always fun, there was a nice flow of banter between everyone until the redundancy phase kicked in, then the work stopped and people lost all motivation (Understandable) which meant for 2 months of my placement the mood wasn't as great as it used to be. Moving to the new office with just the Interns and our on site manager the atmosphere is nice as we are all of the same age but it is more open plan so we have to be a lot more reserved than before.

The placement was very well organised , we were split into shift teams with two interns per team, the training program was intense but you picked a lot of things up very quickly on the job, after a month you were well in the swing of things. Post redundancy period things were a little hectic moving to a new office but we were accommodated fairly quickly and have now settled in nicely to our new habitat.

The company has an internal learning site that has training for pretty much anything you could ask for , from programming to Cisco technologies

50/50 at the moment, as much as I would love to come back and work the company in some capacity , It will entirely depend on their turnaround success.

Working on shift in the NOC meant the only other interns I saw for 6 months were NOC interns, all of whom if we weren't working, we were either sleeping or using what little spare time we had to go home and visit family/friends and take care of personal business. After the re location our hours have changed so we have evenings and weekend off which has meant the NOC Interns go out for food and movies and other activities together which is nice.

Cant really complain , I lived in reading for £367 a month for a nice house with people I worked with and commuted via car, which took around 20 minutes each way.

I didn't really sample the nightlife in Reading or Slough.

There are a couple of volunteering schemes for the company to do certain things such as helping with events or charities. I helped the company audit a lot of their hardware from closed down buildings from sites such as egham, Birmingham and Cambridge so I got a hands on look at what goes into corporate IT and data center infrastructure which was cool.