ΝΕΑ

08/12/2015

The Art of IT

Ali majored in arts but through a chance conversation found a new love in IT.

Living in the digital age provides a lot of opportunities for people who don’t have much of a technical background, with people who work in the arts and the humanities able to harness the potential of developments in technology.

Take the case of Ali – a young lady who, being fascinated with the arts, majored in History of Arts and English language at university. However, upon entering the job market, Ali found it difficult to find a job in her chosen field. After trying several jobs in her own field of study, she started to look for something else. A fortunate combination of events brought her together with a friend who was an instructor at a Cisco Networking Academy.

It was a funny conversation about why "buffering" sometimes stops YouTube videos that sparkled her interest in learning more about the building blocks of the Internet. Ali decided to take some CCNA courses in the summer school organised by the Cisco Networking Academy at Technical University of Kosice.

Despite finding the course difficult initially, in a short time she overtook many of her classmates. Surprisingly, a topic that is considered as one of the most difficult for students - IP sub-netting - turned out to be her favorite topic. Within one year, she spent hundreds of hours studying, solving all the Packet Tracer based activities and doing all the hands on labs activities with real networking devices like switches, routers and IP phones.

Ali’s hard work was rewarded by successfully passing the CCNA Industry Certification. With the CCNA certification it was much easier to get a new job. Currently, Ali works as an ICT Administrator as part of the Voice team at T-Systems, a data center outsourcing provider in Slovakia, where she is managing amongst others Cisco IP Phones and TelePresence systems, a job she could not even have imagined doing just a short time ago.