Q&A with Leon Akkin – Level 4 Network Engineer Apprentice at WhiteSpider

After joining the WhiteSpider team earlier this year, Leon has been getting stuck into his role as a Level 4 Network Engineer Apprentice. With a mix of on-the-job and classroom training, a typical week includes spending 4 days working within WhiteSpider's Managed Service or Professional Services teams, and 1 day focused on study. Throughout the 18-month apprenticeship, Leon will attend week-long classroom sessions where he will get the opportunity to network with apprentices from other organisations; developing not only the hard skills needed by techies but those all-important soft skills. 

As a way for you to get to know Leon, we asked him a series of questions:

Q1: Describe your ideal weekend

It really depends on the mood from the week, sometimes I’ll want to go out and see my mates and sometimes getting into some comfy pjs with a good film, album, game or book does the job. Although I did recently get a hefty Lego set so once I have the space that will be taking up a lot of my time.

Q2: Where would you most like to travel to and why? 

Well, I’m trying to convince my friends about the idea of going to the United States for the world cup, but I’ll see how that turns out. More short-term I’d love to visit Cinque Terre in Italy, it’s a coastal region made up of five villages with some of the most colourful architecture I’ve seen. It may or may not be known as a place with banging pesto and focaccia but for indulgence’s sake I would try to ignore that.

Q3: What drew you to this field, and how did you get started? 

I became interested in IT at a fairly young age, me and my dad would regularly visit carboot sales and get broken electronics before repairing them to sell or gift to family members. This tinkering practical side of IT stayed with me and during college I participated in work experience placement with the City of York council in various IT departments, including their infrastructure team. Getting to WhiteSpider and a career in Enterprise Networking really came from my previous job in service delivery. I had many interactions with the infrastructure department and was curious about their enthusiasm to the work they did. However, I did not have the technical backing to understand why. After leaving I became really interested with learning more about Networking and an apprenticeship seemed like the best way to achieve this. I was really impressed by my interviews with WhiteSpider about the technologies and what work I would potentially be doing. With being a Cisco Gold Partner I knew it would be the perfect place to start my Networking career and so before a final offer was made I had already mentally accepted the job. 

Q5: What aspect of WhiteSpider makes you proud to work here? 

The apprenticeship involves three weeklong learning placements which has been useful in bringing me up to speed with some core Networking concepts. So far, I’ve covered the OSI Model, VLANs, routing protocols such as BGP. There are multiple labs based on the learning that is done which helps with applying learnt knowledge to real-world scenarios.
 
While not strictly related to my day-to-day I have also learnt and applied some cloud computing skills by building Azure and AWS environments through optional labs from the apprenticeship provider.

Q6: How would you describe your experience so far? 

One of the best parts of working at WhiteSpider is how supportive the team is. I've come into this role with very little professional experience and near zero technical knowledge, but whenever I have found myself stuck and needing help (especially with SD-WAN), one of the guys has always been available to help and share their industry expertise. 

Q7: Wild Card: If you could work in any profession, it has to be unrelated to IT or the Tech industry, what would it be and why? 

I would love to be a chef, you don't get to wearing a size large without enjoying some good food.

WhiteSpider are always on the look out for potential new apprentices to drive current and future growth. Should you be interested in joining the team, visit our Careers page to submit your details and a member of our team will reach out to you.