NEW UPDATE…PLEASE GO TO VINCENTROSAS.COM for my new page.
About Me
I am Vince Rosas. I wear many hats at the company I work for. Currently, my main title is “Installation Manager”, but I am also a Network Engineer, Desktop Support Technician, Trainer, among other roles. I’ve also been called a Wizard and even have the hat to prove it.
I started working in retail sales and, as fun as it was, I’ve always been technically inclined and always ended up having to do some form of tech support while also doing my sales. After being burnt out on sales jobs after 10 years, I bounced around at different dead-end jobs for 3 years. Working in a call center doing telemarketing and sales showed me that I did not want more of the same. I took on jobs as an independent contractor doing IT work and ride sharing. Those jobs showed me that I wanted to focus on IT, but I wasn’t ready to go into business for myself and, while the freedom was nice, being an independent contractor also wasn’t for me.
That is when I decided to go back to school. I felt like not having a degree or a certification was holding me back from getting work directly in IT since my previous job history was all officially in sales. My technical skills were all from personal experience and on the job learning. A college degree shows that I can dedicate myself, multitask, and learn quickly. All of which are skills required to get ahead in a career.
Finishing my degree program was a long journey and there were many times I felt like quitting. It was primarily thanks to encouragement from my mom and sister. Neither of my parents nor any of my siblings went to college, and my older siblings all barely finished high school, so I knew being the first to get a degree would make my mom proud. My mom, unfortunately, passed halfway through my program but losing her only drove me to work harder to complete my degree. I still want to make her proud.
My younger sister is also a huge source of encouragement for me. Whenever I feel like I can’t finish or just simply don’t want to, she pushes me to continue and restores my faith in myself that I can complete my program. I also am lucky enough to work for a company that encourages me to complete my program so my coworkers and superiors also give lots of encouragement. They even planned a celebration for me when I finished my program.
At work, I managed a small IT department that supported external clients on top of my other responsibilities. When our last two technicians quit suddenly within a couple of months, I was the only one left who could do the job. The owners could, but they were too busy running the business and managing the more profitable video surveillance side of the business.
I manage our installation teams now and have been training our new IT technicians to handle what remains of our IT department. My current goal is to get my crews to be entirely self-sufficient and not need to rely on me or our other IT techs except in rare instances. This has forced them to sit in front of a computer and do training courses from vendors, which I know they hate, but it will help them in the long term with the direction the company is going. This will benefit them and the company. They will be more useful, and the company can be more efficient and grow faster since more people can train new technicians and more people can handle support requests.
I have also managed to bring our average overtime down from 55-60 hours each week to under 50. Not an easy feat when we typically have a long commute to job sites and work under tight schedules. However, by getting input from our field techs, as well as having been a field tech, I have a solid understanding of how long it takes to do the jobs they are assigned and push them to complete them faster. While this has caused some of the techs to be disgruntled in the pay reduction, by training them to handle more responsibilities, they will be able to justify a higher pay grade.