Phil Norton
Systems Analyst, Sourcebooks Inc., Naperville, Ill.
As a teen, Phil Norton loved video games, computers and technology. He thought he'd become a programmer. But a high school internship working as a desktop maintenance technician at a local hospital led to a part-time desktop support job. "Working at the hospital, getting the feel of all the different aspects of IT, I realized I didn't just want to be coding," Norton says. "I wanted to get out there and help people."
Between 2005 and 2007, Norton ran the shipping, logistics and IT backbone of an auto parts retail business that he founded with a friend, while working 12-hour weekend shifts at the hospital. Eventually, he became full time at the hospital and held progressively more responsible support positions as he attended college, becoming the hospital's applications analyst in 2010. This fall, Norton, 28, became a systems analyst at Sourcebooks, a Chicago-based publisher.
Education: Associate degree in computer science, Purdue University; Bachelor's degree in Management Information Systems, National Louis University, Chicago
Certifications: MCSA (Windows XP, Server 2003 Environment, Server 2003 Infrastructure), SQL Server 2008, CompTIA A+, CompTIA Network+, CompTIA Security+ and CompTIA Healthcare IT Technician
Tell us about your current job.
I joined Sourcebooks in September. It's growing rapidly, and my first project has been to help to transition its financial records and systems onto an SAP platform. Previously I was a systems analyst at a hospital where I was one of 90 IT employees and one of 2,000 employees overall. At Sourcebooks, our IT team is seven people. So everything I do has a lot more impact.
Our SAP implementation project team includes the vice presidents of IT and financial accounting; several people from the IT department, including myself; managers from across all the different disciplines (customer service, sales, and accounting); and two consultants helping with the implementation. We meet twice weekly to discuss our progress—what's working, what people think about it, what we're going to do next.
I am working with my manager and one of my consultants to transfer every single record, every item, all customer records, all financial records, from the first journal entry, into SAP… we want all the data to be as clean as possible so we can run parallel systems for a month while people get use to the SAP system.
What's the best part of your job?
Watching this implementation from the ground up, watching the data get better and better, and being a part of it every step of the way. It's really cool.
What's the worst part of your job?
At the hospital, everybody in the IT department had their discrete role because of how big we were. Now at a smaller company, I'm involved in every aspect of IT, so I have more end-to-end responsibility. It's kind of cool, but at the same time it's a little scary. My team members will back me up if I ever have a problem. But I have a greater stake in my work so I must take more ownership of it.
How do you stay up-to-date with what's happening in IT?
I have more than 140 websites with RSS feeds going into my Google Reader. So at lunch I'll be scrolling through tech websites, gaming websites, Apple websites. It's basically like my newspaper: I'll send links to my friends and they send links to me. And I benefit from being on the CompTIA Subject Matter Expert Technical Advisory Committee (CSTAC). I go to CSTAC workshops and hear what everyone else in the IT industry is seeing and I get to talk about what I'm seeing.
What advice do you have for someone who wants to pursue a career in IT?
Learn by doing. Get your own computer, take it apart, and put it back together. Look for internships that interest you. Every company is always looking for help with something. And get involved with IT communities, both online or with organizations like CompTIA or the Microsoft Certified Professional network. If you have all that in place along with a degree, employers will consider you ahead of other job applicants.
