Hi Everybody! I am Paul and I am Service Delivery Engineer
in the Advanced Customer Services team. My position requires technical skills
as well as a high level of communication and interpersonal skills.
1. Please describe the Oracle organisation you are part of.
Advanced Customer Services assist Customers with proactive guidance and reactive services through annualized packages to optimize and streamline operations for Mission Critical Applications running on Oracle Software and Engineered Systems. ACS delivers Customer Satisfaction for the full product lifecycle from Architecture Design to Implementation to Production with a focus on performance, scalability with high level of service through operations optimization.
I work as expert on BI Solution (OBIEE / BI Applications), my role is to help in designing Architecture, delivering proactive performance and implementation reviews and knowledge transfer on best practices for OBIEE / BI Applicatoins implementation, deployment, robustness and performance and TCO optimization.
2. How was your start at Oracle?
I started in May 2008 as an Intern in the Contracts Team doing something completely different from what I do now. I graduated from the Faculty of Cybernetics and after a few months I was hired to a full time position in the Romanian Consulting Team as a Junior Consultant. I worked initially on Siebel but quickly picked up on BI as it was my main interest. I was able to take part in some major projects in the Insurance, Banking, Telecommunications and Energy sectors.
3. Tell us more about your career path
I really enjoyed my role as a Junior Consultant because it combined both technical skills and the business knowledge as I had to explain to nontechnical people the benefits of particular technical solutions. I really enjoyed the little team I was in and the feeling of “we’re in this together”. We could always rely on our team and this brought us together.
I moved to a more senior role of Staff Consultant, but in 2010 I moved to Barcelona, Spain where I worked as Senior Consultant for one of Oracle’s Partners in Business Intelligence. I stayed with them until 2012 when I returned to Romania and got a role back at Oracle in the team I am now part of.
4. What have been the most challenging moments in your career?
I think that one of the most challenging moments has been working as a Staff Consultant whilst working in the Romanian Oracle Consulting Team because of the vast variety of tasks that I had to do: creating documentation, technical designs, performing the development work, managing customer expectations and project plans etc.
A funnier moment, but also challenging, was a call I got when working in London for a client - I had to leave for another customer further north right away. Coming from the warm winter of Barcelona I was completely unprepared for this and also for the snowstorm that followed. Now that I think about it, this was not the only “Friday surprise” I got as I had similar situations with many projects across EMEA!
5. What are your future plans?
I am looking into moving to a more technical role with Exalytics and maybe becoming a Technical Account Manager to work with dedicated clients.
6. What would you recommend to students and graduates that
are planning to start their career within an international company?
If you’re considering a technical career you should first understand the basic concepts and you can learn this through the Oracle Academy or the tutorials and documentation that Oracle has publicly available. For example, you need to learn how a Dimensional Model is built if you are speaking about Oracle Business Intelligence.
All Junior hires should make the most of each task rather than always trying to do things they don’t know. Yes, you do have to look after extending your knowledge, but for now you can at least follow through with what you have on your hands.
If you are looking at a career where you interact more, I think that building a strong relationship with customers is one of the best things you can do because this is how you will learn their business and provide better services.
Check out oracle.com/careers for more information about starting a career at Oracle!