Not really tech support..but part of my job

[fuego.livejournal.com]

Currently studying for CVE (Certified Videoconferencing Engineer) exam. Work sent me out to Colorado in late November for the class, and I would have liked to take the test earlier but holidays and a whole bunch of personal crap have made studying very difficult until recently, and I will be taking it within the next two weeks or so.

This is my first certification ever...wahoo. I'm going just a little crazy, I've got protocols and standards and all that noise spewing forth from my brain, going just a little bats...

Wish me luck, folks!

Comments

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

That's still tech in my eyes. Go for it, you'll be great.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

hehe...thanks. In my brain, I was emphasizing the *support* half pg "tech support"..but that obviously doesn't translate in my typing :-P

[fuego.livejournal.com]

gawds, I just can't type tonight....

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

All tech is support. :) Excpet, of course, for lusers.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

lol...yeah I guess you could say that.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Just curious, as I haven't gotten into VC much:

How much of the exams aren't things which could be picked up from manuals and so forth on the job?

[fuego.livejournal.com]

I've been doing tech support in video conferencing for almost two years, I took the CVE class back in November...there was a good bit of stuff that's come up in passing or in a very general sense on the job, but a *lot* of stuff that I've never encountered. Now...I'm only doing frontline support, there's a lot of stuff that you'll see more often if you're higher up, but for first level, it is a lot of fresh territory.

The on the job work I do is not only video conferencing units, but also on phones and a few other odds and ends produced by the company. A lot of this is product specific, whereas the CVE is video conferencing theory, it applies to video conferencing in general, not just the specific equipment that I'm working on.

Um...hope that made some sense? (I'm a little tired, just getting ready to end a 12-hour shift here, and with all that studying..I can't brain today.)

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Nah, is fine. I was just wondering how much of VC stuff made it into the various product manuals and how much was deeper-level fundamentals which really helped to be learned first.

Different areas of specialisation vary a lot on this - some things will have manuals like ancient tomes, especially if they're fairly new tech and need a lot of tweaking for compatibility or to cover multiple protocols and implementations. More mature or larger-scale stuff tends to have had the industry standards already largely hashed out and a degree of auto-configuration which makes setup and admin easier and the manuals correspondingly thinner.