Charlie Collett, Marketing Content Coordinator at Techbuyer, shares his thoughts on driving data centre expertise and personal development.
If there’s one thing that comes up time and time again in employee interviews, it’s the willingness of management to say: “Why not?” and make great ideas a reality. So it was no surprise when I found out that Techbuyer’s latest development was born from an employee’s idea.
The Techbuyer Academy is a new department which supplies technical training to company staff. From networking equipment to Dell blade enclosures, and SSDs to server memory, the training provides detailed insight into a wide range of IT and data centre equipment, ensuring that we uphold the highest industry standards for our customers every time.
The Academy is run by Slav Dabrowski, Technical Training Coordinator, who started at Techbuyer in the server configuration and testing departments. As a previous physics teacher, not only was Slav was the perfect person for the job, but he was also the person who suggested the idea.
“A few years into my role at Techbuyer, I remember wondering how I could develop further and bring something worthwhile to the business,” says Slav. “That’s when I started thinking about my teaching skills, and how I could utilise them. Management liked my ideas and let me run with them, so I put together the plans. Before I knew it, the classroom was being built!”
The Academy first launched in February 2020 – unfortunately just two weeks before the Covid-19 lockdown, and so training was limited at first. Now things are up and running again, with all the appropriate social distancing and Covid-19 regulations in place.
“A lot of the products and services that we deal with are very technical and difficult to visualise,” says Slav. “This is why high quality training is so important. When I’m teaching, I always try to use analogies and real-life scenarios, to make sure I’m using a language that’s understandable for everyone. For instance, a hard drive is like a library because you can store, read and write data.”
“I’ve trained about 50 people so far, which is roughly a quarter of employees,” Slav continues. “I teach in four sessions with four people at a time, each from a different department to make sure business operations can run as normal. Whether it’s someone from purchasing, sales or marketing, everyone has different areas of IT expertise. I like to think that after my training, people have the same level of understanding once they’ve left the classroom.”
When I asked Slav about the best parts of the job, he smiled and told me about a recent phone call he had. “One of our sales executives rang me up just a few hours after they’d completed their training… A customer had called and asked them one of the exact same questions that was in my test! They were able to give more of a detailed answer than they would have done previously, which is a great result.”
“Sharing my knowledge and getting to know everyone is also a great part of the job. I was fairly shy when I first joined the company so it’s nice to feel like I’ve connected with people.”
“One thing I love about Techbuyer is that if you’re a person who wants to learn and develop, you will always do well working here.”
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