One Cisco Many Careers: Get to know Dulce Gonzalez’s journey from Professional Services to Technical Assistance Center
In this new blog series titled “One Cisco, Many Careers”, you will have the opportunity to learn about the career path of our employees at Cisco. We will explore the roles they have held, provide insights into their backgrounds, and showcase the diverse career opportunities Cisco has to offer.
Keep reading this article to explore Dulce’s career journey.
Over seven years I started my professional experience in Professional Services (PS) when I transitioned from the Cisco Internship Program in Mexico. During this one-year internship I got a CCNA, a CCNP, did a rotation in CALO and in Enterprise TAC, soft-skills training.
Although I’ve built my entire career at Cisco, I feel like I’ve worked in so many companies by now as I’ve expanded my horizons by working in different roles and different technologies, all in one place.
How is a day-to-day of a Consulting Engineer in Professional Services?
As a Consulting Engineer in Professional Services, on Service Provider technology, I supported migration and implementation projects. My tasks included:
- Implementation: preparing and executing Maintenance Windows in customer environments.
- Document writing: High Level Design (HLD), Low Level Design (LLD), and Method of Procedure (MOP).
- Testing & Design: test the content of the documents in a Lab environment.
Can you explain how was your transition from Consulting Engineer to Technical Consultant Engineer?
I was happy in Professional Services, but I also thought that sometimes we need to feel uncomfortable to grow. This is why I decided – even though I was scared – to move to a different team and technology.
As I was not only moving to a different role, but also a different technology, I started studying a few months before I applied to any position to ensure I had the required technical knowledge.
I remember joining an HR Talk where recruiters shared that they frequently consider candidates that don’t match 100% of the requirements of a given position. This will allow these candidates to have room to grow in the position to fulfil the profile, and when they exceed the expectations, they can either get promoted or start thinking about another internal move.
That made total sense for me. I decided to take the risk and learn the technical requirements as much as possible, without trying to be perfect and accepting that no-one really is, and we can just try to do our best in every step.
During the multiple interviews, I was honest and true to myself, expressing that my main interest was to push myself to grow my technical profile and improve how I interacted with customer, teammates, and stakeholders.
I got the job! Today, as a Technical Consulting Engineer in the Server Virtualization (SV) team, I solve cases opened by our customers, focused specially newer technologies such as Cisco Intersight. I also collaborate to align our technical scope with business needs by identifying sales opportunities through leads and improving our relationship with the Account Teams.
I’m also in charge of bringing together the TAC, PS and Customer Success teams and setting the right expectations in terms of responsibilities and scope. Communication and alignment between teams is key as it provides better collaboration and distribution of workload, networking opportunities, and improvement of customer satisfaction.
If you had to give advice to people who want to change their career paths at Cisco, what would you say?
Take the risk, even if you’re afraid. The worst scenario will be that you will not like it and you can always continue moving, which implies new knowledge like technical, processes, how Cisco works, and who knows when some past experiences can help you to improve in your current or future positions.
I won’t deny that sometimes learning something new is difficult and frustrating, but I wanted the challenge and I’m happy to face it. Be resilient and keep going, even when you feel you cannot do it. That is called discipline. In the end, what TAC taught me is that there is always a workaround.
Take the risk and discover the Cisco world and all its colours.
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