Can you please tell us a bit about you and what you do at Login?
I work as a Citrix Consultant and have been working at Login for about 3 years now. My role as a Citrix Consultant means that I work together with our customers on several different technical matters. I help them with plans for the future, support them in issues they are facing, provide them with extra insight into certain configurations, perform health checks and other relevant areas they need support in.

Thinking about the work you do in the position as Citrix Consultant, what is it that you enjoy the most about it and what you do?
The thing I enjoy the most is the sense of freedom I have and the opportunity to pretty much control my own agenda as long as the customer is happy. I enjoy the fact that I feel like the work I do has an actual impact on the society. Having the opportunity to work with hospitals, financial instances, and governmental instances to give a few examples means that you work with instances that are very important for the society. Getting to support them in the optimisation of processes to make things simpler, quicker, and easier but also sometimes more secure and finding the balance between this, is something I enjoy contributing to.

If we think more in terms of the technologies that you work with, what is it you enjoy the most about them?
When I joined Login, I made the decision to focus on and keep developing within Citrix out of the three main vendors that Login has a partnership with. In all honesty, the reason for my choice had a lot to do with the fact that Citrix was not as well represented at the company at the time. I therefore thought that it could be a great area to develop within and that I could do a great job to support the Citrix team. When I think about what it is that I enjoy the most about working with Citrix I would say that I enjoy getting to work with a lot of thriving companies and incredibly talented people as it is widely used among fortune 500 companies. This means that most of the time, the requirements are challenging, and I find that neat.

How do you make sure to stay updated with the latest trends and developments?
A big part in staying updated when it comes to all the vendors we work with is the communities they have. These communities play a huge role when it comes to delivering and consuming information to other industry professionals and the vendor. Within the communities’ professionals share insights and information with each other through different manners such as webinars or blogs and events. You even share information and knowledge with competitors in the market and help each other acquire new information to further develop your knowledge as we all want to deliver great results and do a good job for the customers we work with. Surprisingly, there is this unspoken balance and respect for your competitors where we all benefit from supporting each other.

You mentioned earlier that you have been at Login for about 3 years now, can you tell us a bit about you journey since joining?
It has actually been quite a journey for me since I started. I began working in the Managed Service department as an Engineer and took care of customers services on a regular basis. However, I knew from the very beginning that I wanted to become a consultant in the future and wanted to make sure I developed in that direction to be able to achieve my goal. So, I raised my interest with my managers and HR to see what I needed to do and what requirement I needed to fulfil. Then I made sure to work hard to achieve them and once I did, I got promoted to Junior Consultant.

As time passed, I have gotten more in touch with the community. I am trying to work towards being awarded one of the highly regarded titles the vendor only awards a select group of elite professionals in the world. My focus is on the ADC (Netscaler) market. I am creating an own toolkit to help people secure their ADC (Netscalers) for free without having to be an ADC expert. I simply want to contribute and do my part for the community to provide people with knowledge and insights I have gained from my experiences.

So, when you started at Login you already knew how you wished to progress in your career, did you receive the support you wanted in order to achieve this goal?
I would definitely say that the help and support from both my manager and HR was there even though there was no clear path to begin with. It was not because they did not want to help but more to do with the fact there was not an existing plan. However, we sat down together to look at my profile and experiences to see what I needed to work on, and I have definitely had help to work on that to become a consultant.

Thinking a bit more general, what is it that you enjoy the most about working at Login?
The awesome thing about Login is first of all that we work with the three different main vendors that we do. This means that you get a lot of insight from other parts of the industry as well. Another thing is that the people working here are extremely knowledgeable, they have worked in the industry for years and some of them have high statuses in the different communities. Having colleagues who are so experienced means that you can learn a lot from each other and exchange valuable information.

Would you recommend other people to join Login if they want to progress in their IT career?
I would say that it is a great place to progress you IT career if you have some previous experience already. You can be quite junior in the market and grow immensely here as there are great people to learn from and we have several examples of people progressing in their career internally.

I would also like to promote great initiatives and programs for women in tech as I believe it is important to get more women into the tech industry. Login Consultants is a part of Orange Business Services who have an initiative called Women in Tech which focuses on mentoring, careers for women and a range of activities to support women throughout their career. I would also like to highlight the “Women in Technology” mentorship programme where strong female role models within the Citrix community support mentees. A programme which is expanding as additional female role models in the community become mentors. I want to honour the great work that is done and encourage more female to participate in and make use of programmes like these.