What is your role at Northgate? My name is Michael Grainger and I’m the manager of the IT Support desk and I’ve been here for just about 2 ½ years now.
Describe your typical day: Basically, the first thing I’ll do is come in and have a quick check of the systems to see if any site is down or anything important is down. Usually we get one quite early on because people are calling in droves and then it’s just a case of getting them to the correct teams and making sure they’re resolved as soon as possible. Beyond that we do everything you might think of for an IT technician. We could be setting up a new user, we could be fixing or resolving any number of issues, on the computers or the sites, switchers, printers, and sometimes it’s just information and passing people to the right team so they can look into it and a more involved problem like applications or servers.
What’s the working environment like? It is a very busy environment, it’s sometimes quite stressful, we get a lot of deadlines, there’s a lot of projects going on, not just from ourselves but from other teams. So we have to be on the ball, we have to be working close together and be mindful of what everyone’s doing which we do, which makes it a really good working environment.
What training & development have you received? Northgate offers quite a bit of learning development actually, it’s really good and I’m currently on an ILM course, a level 5, which they put me through and it’s one of the first of its kind at Northgate, which is all about training a section of people, not just from the head offices which I might have done previously but from across the entire state. Choosing managers and training them up so we’ve got the right qualifications to back us up for our jobs. We look for people who will gel and get on well and have got the driving enthusiasm to want to learn, to want to develop and want to become better.
Overall, what do you think of Northgate? I absolutely love working for Northgate and hope to see myself here for many many years to come and for anyone interested in the industry at Northgate then I say, go and give it a shot.
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