Employees

Technical Analyst

Employee Name:

Cam Inkster

Title:

Technical Analyst

Ministry:

Ministry of Citizens' Services

Background:

Education: Diploma, Information Technology; Diploma, Network and Information Systems (CompuCollege School of Business)
Member of the BC Public Service Since: 2005

My Role: I am responsible for maintaining, upgrading, changing and supporting applications services. The specific applications I support are Office Communicator, Live Meeting and Groove. Each of these has a set of servers and a set of infrastructure that needs to be supported. I make sure that when users go to use the application on their desktop, it works for them.

Career Path:

I started out doing a co-op term at BC Building Corporation (now Accommodation and Real Estate Services). I was then given a contract to do a desktop rollout before spending two years doing technical support for the Federal Government. I also spent some time working for IBM and in 2005, I got a job with Workplace Technology Services, where I am today.

What I Like Best:

My job is exciting and fun and we're always on cutting edge. We get to work with new technologies and emerging technologies once they become available. For example, advanced collaboration and communications is new to businesses out there and not many are using it. I work with a dynamic group of people from every background and every level of technical support experience. Being in Workplace Technology Service, you get a unique responsibility of supporting the government as a whole.

Ideas At Work:

I think our biggest success is continuing to provide unified communications to ministries and our broader public sector clients. We continue to improve existing applications while also building new services, such as the Office Communications and Live Meeting service. One of the largest projects I was involved in was implementing the daylight savings time change upgrade. We spent a weekend to ensure that all Mailbox and BlackBerry calendars were up-to-date the day that daylight savings time went into effect. Many organizations didn't even attempt this upgrade. I think it shows this groups dedication to providing the best possible service to all of our customers, and that's something I can be proud of.

Advice:

Don't apply for a job just based on the job description. If you have many of the qualifications, but not all of them, apply anyway. Government is advancing quite rapidly in IT, and there may be an opportunity for you to grow into a role. To succeed in this job, it's good to have a strong background in IT. You are going to want to learn new advanced collaboration tools and be familiar with Blackberrys and MS Exchange.