Graham Young

    IT Operations Service Transition Manager
    Vodafone Ireland
    Ireland
    Electronic Engineering
    Masters of Electronic Engineering
    2010

    Communication skills and quick technical learning and ability. Project Management is essential for what I do. I learnt to manage projects effectively through my time in Maynooth. If you want to get a leg up in this industry I would advise also learning Prince 2 and ITIL foundation. It's essential in a Operational work-space and makes you stand out from the crowd. All customer focused experience is valuable too and never sell yourself short, if you've worked in a shop or a supermarket you've learnt skills in customer awareness in a direct way, show you've got that experience so use it for your CV

    After Maynooth University I decided to get experience to make my application more appealing to Vodafone Ireland. I worked for a 3rd party vendor to the company on the Government Work Placement Scheme. This gave me the extra edge I needed and after much preparation and study of the company’s background, aims and development I applied for the Graduate scheme. Vodafone hired 20 people from 2000 applicants. My edge was my experience, people networking, my CV, my linkedin profile and my match to the company’s culture.

    I manage the Transition of new applications and services to the company that have relation to IT Operations. The skills for my job and skills I would advise students to try to learn for this type of work would include: ITIL & Prince 2 Training, Process Improvement, Stakeholder Management, Customer Experience, Service Quality, Product development, Business Development,Business Analytics, Application Development, Service Delivery, Customer Management, Quality Assurance and Process Development.

    It's a job that requires a lot of multitasking. I work with a lot of different projects at the same time at different phases in the project life cycle so being able to switch my way of thinking between each project meeting is the biggest challenge. I would say a great way to make sure you can maintain this is to use Microsoft One Note. A great tool to capture all information you need in all meetings. Store voice recordings, store meeting notes, share them with colleagues etc all in one place. It keeps you structured.

    (updated July 2015)

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