For the team here at Internet & Telephone, it’s been a long week of take-out food, bag lunches and leftover doughnuts (don’t you judge me).  Our resident Virus/Security Expert, and team nominee for first-round canonization, Chef Michael Jordan has been away attending training courses.

And while these courses doubtless serve to make him a better engineer, they do little to fill our bellies.

Glad to have you back, Chef MJ!

One of the defining cultural characteristics of Internet & Telephone is our focus on Professional Development.  In order to deliver first class service to our customers, it is critically important that our Engineers remain at the forefront of the latest technology.  We also know that in order to retain the best and brightest talent, our company must align itself with the personal career goals of our employee.  The contribution has to go both ways:  Our employees drive our success, and we give them the tools to do so.

So when our lead Microsoft Engineer, John Gagnon, traveled to California last week to attend a Cisco bootcamp, our whole team was pulling for him.  It’s considered extremely rare for an Engineer to attend a week-long bootcamp, absorb an entire week’s worth of information, and then successfully pass the Certification exam all in the same stint. In fact, it’s considered so rare that the boot camp instructor virtually guaranteed that nobody from the class would be able to do it. But guess what – he was wrong!

And the whole team was waiting to celebrate when John returned victorious, with his Cisco Certified Network Associate’s cert in hand! Break out the cake and beer!