Profile

Mr Jeffrey Smith

BEE

Telstra

Course of study:
Bachelor of Electronic Engineering 2008

Has your degree at La Trobe prepared you well for the workplace?

I find the most useful skills I learnt at University were:
  • agility: the ability to teach myself something on the fly. The ability to consistently learn is important, as often a new project brings with it unknown concepts.
  • programming: I now program in network to application level languages rather than in firmware level and I have learnt four new languages with my work at Telstra.
  • project management: a great deal of my time is spent on vendor and stakeholder management.

Tell us a little about your work history

My first employment was the graduate program here at Telstra. This involved rotations to three groups of my choosing and exposed me to the fact that in a large company your job can be completely different from one role to the next.

My first role was around VoIP, RTP and SIP signalling dimensioning for cross network security, my second rotation was a wireless email applications role in a Mobile Networks group and I finished the year in the Wireless Engineering area working for a team called MMS and SMS Technologies, where I currently work.

I am a domain specialist for MMS. I usually have a role on projects that include MMS, whether it be in consultation, design and build or involvement in the entire project life cycle, I find that I am always learning. Whether it is a hardware migration, application build or simply a change in the network, my role varies from capturing the requirements or impacts to the MMS network, to designing the changes and migration strategies to actually the build and test phases.

We recently delivered a project that was forecast to be a 12 month project which we managed to complete within 7 months. This required some really long hours over the final month of the project and changing the migration strategy to run a lot more things in parallel (a bit of plate-spinning and accepting more risk). The payoff was the project delivered on time with high visibility and no outage to customer traffic.

What are things you enjoy most about your job?

I think I enjoy the large range of technologies.

I find from role to role, even project to project, I am doing something quite different to the last time. Also working for an enterprise network means I get to use equipment not readily seen anywhere outside a Telecommunications organisation.

What advice can you offer to current students?

Consider a role at a Telco if you like a corporate environment that allows you to work in various fields of technology. If you have a flair for system architecture or project management then you would most likely be suited for a role at an organisation like Telstra.

A huge benefit with working for a large company is that you can not only change jobs within the company, you have the opportunity to start new careers in other fields. A lot of managers are ex-engineers here at Telstra.

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