E12 - Daim Eric at High Point Solutions

On this week’s episode on The Route to Networking, George Barnes, the Co-Founder and Director at Hamilton Barnes, sits down with Daim Eric, the Staging, and Installation Engineer at Highpoint Solutions. In this episode, they dive into Daim’s experience in the industry, university degree, and master’s degree.

Kicking it off with where it all started, Daim took his degree in Network Computing, taking it as an undergraduate and now doing his master’s degree in it too. Before that, he did a BTEC National Diploma in Software Programming, which covered all aspects of computing, but he had no idea about anything regarding computing. This essentially led him into taking Network Computing as a degree, following a quick Google search on networking, thinking it was ‘pretty cool’ and a saturated market so jumped straight into the deep end, took a long shot and this is where he is today.

Shortly after leaving university, he got himself a placement with Highpoint through Hamilton Barnes. Throughout his second year at university, he applied for many jobs but got nowhere and all of sudden struck gold in finding Hamilton Barnes, which got him his first graduate job at Highpoint. The transition from university to Highpoint was quite the jump for Daim. His boss said something which stuck with him… when you’re a graduate you come up thinking you’re the bee’s knees and know everything about networking. Then when you’re put into a working environment you know next to nothing. You haven’t been in a data centre; you haven’t seen a network put together and put things into perspective massively.

After having no luck applying for jobs throughout uni, you can imagine the excitement when he was offered a placement with Highpoint. Daim says what attracted him most to Highpoint was the hands-on approach. When he saw the job description saying staging and installation engineering he thought “Wow this is different”. He was able to get hands-on straight away by installing a switch.

Jumping from university straight into work is a high jump for many, but Daim faces daily challenges that he didn’t touch on even slightly when he was in education. One of those is getting to know the staging process. He works close by with the sales team, as they talk to the customer and get the requirements that are needed from them and that is passed on to his team and he has to make sure that the materials they give to them are good enough for the customer requirements and just basically learning around that process. Dealing with other people’s work at a data centre is another thing he finds a challenge, “say you’ve been allocated a position in a specific reck, but the guy above you has been an idiot and had his power come through your U and you’re like, well I can’t put my switch in now because this person’s switch is already live, I can’t just take it out”.

The great thing about working for Highpoint is that everyone’s a perfectionist, everyone likes to do things the right way to make sure it’s done to the best of their ability which is one of their fundamentals.

With a fast-growing industry like this one, Daim couldn’t recommend it enough. It’s something he would suggest doing down to the industry ‘booming’ and will continue to ‘boom’. If you can get into it now at the foundation level, then you’ll be fine. University gives you a great foundation to work from and he would do it all over again if he had the chance.

If there’s one piece of advice, he would give to a student going into this industry, what would it be? … Daim tells George on The Route to Networking, don’t miss it!