Persistence and Networking Pays Off For Control-M Newbie.
In March 2012 I was brought in as an intern at my company to shadow the ways of IT and also be a part time Control-m scheduler. As soon I started in the IT arena I knew that I was going go be constantly drinking knowledge from a fire hose. To help me handle this I began by something I do well which is networking! The first thing I did was created this blog and started posting things that I came across. I guess you could call this blog a journal of my Control-m progress. This led to a good amount of hits and also some comments from other Control-m experts. Another thing I did was I began building all kinds of jobs in our Control-m development environment. This served as good practice and helped me really dive in and learn certain functions of Control-m. I also did a lot of googlling related to anything on Control-m I could find. I did find things but a lot of the stuff I found didn’t apply to my environment or were subjects well beyond my skillset. It was very frustrating because Control-m is such a small specialty it’s hard to find a lot of good information online. Eventually I stumbled upon a site that was run by Control-m subject matter expert that dedicated to his time with Control-m. I actually reached out to the Control-m expert by emailing the contact information on his site, just to start up some Control-m conversation. Well it turned out he loves helping folks in the Control-m community. This led to a lot of resourceful emails and phone calls. Eventually I was able to get this guy on to do some Control-m training and other types of work for my IT shop. From our constant Control-m dealings I now consider this guy and friend and Control-m colleague. I also developed a relationship with one of BMC’s control-m experts and salesmen. He was always good to check on me and answer all my questions. And he even advised my manager at the time to upgrade our Control-m environment from version 7 to version 8. His recommendation was approved and then next thing you know, I was tasked to do the migration. Around this time I also began to work with BMC Support with a lot of issues I ran across. This was also a good resource for me in certain situations. Another thing that came along in Feb. 2013 BMC Software invited me to one of their annual Control-m Briefing conferences in Houston. Going into this I thought this would be just a boring quick turn around trip. I was wrong about that. It turned out to be a good time and led me to more Control-m knowledge and even more subject matter experts that I was able to network with. In fact one of the contacts I met I still reach out today for any Control-m questions and sometimes shoot him a text to see how he is doing. He happens to be a really talented Control-m Administrator and scheduler. In fact he was pretty much born to be a Control-m expert because his mother is a career Control-m scheduler as well. I just think that is really neat side note. Another thing that I did to increase my networking opportunities was created a Linkedin account. This has served as a very useful tool and has put me in contact with a lot of good IT connections and other folks in business as well.
By building up a strong network of Control-m colleagues and constantly building things in developmentI catapulted me from being an intern in March 2012 to owning Control-m at my shop by December of 2012. It doesn’t hurt to network and be persistent no matter what you’re trying to accomplish.
Good post, buddy. I’m sure you know this already, but BMC posts “how to” videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3roW1VoS9C914vFA86Oj9Q
Check them out!!! Enjoy…
Thanks! I have a lot of neat stuff I have in draft form still I just haven’t been on here to post. BMC does have lots of good information. I guess I should have worded it a little differently to show at the time when I started there wasn’t as much out there out there at the time. There is so much more Control-m information out there thanks to BMC!! I will check on the youtube videos. It’s been a while since I got out there and looked around. Peace out TG!