In the beginning there was Rock and Roll & headbands
In the early 90’s I was a Mechanic (Auto Technician) Working for GM dealerships and had been for several years. I had my ASE certifications and was doing well. To this day I enjoy turning wrench’s, but only on my own stuff.
My brother was working for the IT Department of the Library system in Colorado Springs, Co. We went for a visit and he explained RAID ( Redundant array inexpensive disks) to me. I was very interested and wanted to know more. When we returned home I went to Barnes and Noble and purchased the four book set on NT 4.0 MCSE self training. long story short, I purchased another PC, hub and nic’s and started learning about networking and computers. when I thought I was really smart I went to Houston and took two of the microsoft certification tests, failed both. not quite as smart as I thought I was. (lessons in humility) I kept studying, doing break fix, calling my brother and asking questions, went back to the testing center, retook my exams, and passed. Rinse and repeat, I had networking essentials, workstation, server and exchange certs. I was feeling like the cock of the walk. Got a interview with a temp agency for Dell in Round Rock, four hour drive from home, they wanted me take a test, so I did. Results of that were “you are no way capable of being hired by Dell or any IT org. ” All my balloons were popped, went home feeling pretty dang low. (second lesson in humility)This was on a Thursday. I walked around with my bottom lip dragging my tracks out for a day or so. then back to studying and reading. Tuesday rolls around I get a call from a recruiter at Dell. We talked for 45 minutes or so, He told me I would get a call from one of his assistants to set up a interview. A week later I was in Round Rock for interviews. The really nice Lady met me and took me to the room for the interview I sat down in the reclining chair and immediately went ass over tea kettle. 🙂 The poor Lady turned white as a sheet and was worried I was injured, I said no nothing but my pride. Ice broken.
I had four interviews with four different managers, went home the next day and the day after I had an offer to work at Dell in corporate desktop support. Yay!! I began with a four week training class on customer support, etiquette, etc. Three months into desktop support I moved into corporate server support and from there into storage and SAN support. I left Dell in 2003 after five nice years. That was a hell of a learning curve in the beginning.
In November of 2005 I began working for NewTek. Helpdesk and anything else that was IT related. there were just two of us at that time, plus one of the R&D guys who was \ is really good with Linux, The supervisor did all of the database stuff and PBX I did pretty much everything else. As the company grew we were able to add more staff. Those were some good years..
As the years passed and the company continued to grow my role expanded to Senior Systems Engineer. In 2010 we purchased a SAN from Dell and all new switches. We had a major makeover of our IT hardware, with the end result of a much better network, consolidated servers into VM’s, much better productivity across the board. In 2016 I migrated our email system from Qmail to Exchange 2013. this was not without some challenges but the migration worked well and greatly improved communications, calendaring, and more.
April 1st 2019 we (NewTek) were told that the company had been sold to Vizrt. this was a major migration as both companies were about the same size. Company growth of all departments exploded, it was a busy 3 years, especially with Covid beginning in March of 2020, Thankfully all the onsite migration of hardware, switches etc had been completed in February 2020.
In 2023 we began looking for a new location that would better serve the company, one was located and the move took place in 2024. In November 2025 The IT department was restructured and approximately 30 employees were terminated globally.
Phew! I have written a book it feels like.
That brings us current, late April 2026, I am once again looking for work in the IT field. A good friends Wife is a resume coach and has been a huge help. But I’m pretty nervous, antsy about going through interviews again after twenty years of steady work. Life keeps getting interesting and everyday is an adventure.
I am keeping up with my skills and improving as well as learning more. I have a homelab with VMware workstation, and several windows and linux VM’s. on an older laptop IS Proxmox with more VM’s. I am learning Ansible and refreshing my knowledge on Docker and Kubernetes. I have a lot of Irons in the fire but I am also fortunate to have some very smart friends from over the years who I can goto when I get stumped (Rueben, Jeremy, y’all can smile here)
I’ll have a link on here for my resume as I continue to work on this site my Linked in page is https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenny-phipps-24780a94/