This site is starting to read like one giant LinkedIn job announcement. Oh well.
Well, as the title says, I have yet another new job. This time, I am working for a pharmaceutical supply company called AmerisourceBergen. I wasn’t looking for a new job, I was reasonably content with my work at Advanced and I’d just been moved from their Cloud Services division to their Modern Desktop department (i.e, End User Computing) which aligned more with what I enjoyed doing. I’ve always preferred working with end user devices and I was happy with getting stuck into that side of things again.
Anyway, I was approached by a nice lady from Lithuania over LinkedIn, telling me about an Endpoint Engineer position and asking me if I was interested in applying for it. At first, I assumed that she was asking if I wanted to work in Lithuania so I politely declined saying that would be one hell of a commute! She came back to me to say that no, they were looking for people in the UK and she asked if I’d like to look further at the job description. I said something along the lines of “Sure, why not?” and she gave me details about the job and the new company. It sounded like a good job and a good match for my skillset so I performed another aptitude test and she arranged an interview with the new company. My interview was with two people from the United States and another from Lithuania. It went well and I got a second interview with the department’s director. I was offered the job and accepted.
My new team is the company’s Endpoint Engineering team, and they are based mostly in continental North America (Texas, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Ontario) but there is a London based engineer working for the team too. The Endpoint Administration team is mostly in Lithuania (again, another engineer in London has just started) and the Engineering and Admin teams work closely together. The time differences between us all makes talking to one another interesting, the Americans are just waking up just as the Lithuanians are stopping for the day and realistically there’s only a three where I can talk to my transatlantic colleagues!
My new team has been very welcoming, they’ve all made sure that I have been introduced to everyone that I’ll be working with, and we hold daily meetings which are more about chatting about nonsense than they are about actual work. It feels a lot more like working in an office than my last job did. I felt pretty isolated when I started working at Advanced, but I don’t have that feeling here.
I’ll admit that I’d not heard of AmerisourceBergen before I was approached, but then I’ve not worked in the healthcare industry before so I don’t suppose I would have done. They’re a large organisation with around 40,000 employees worldwide. They have just acquired Alliance Healthcare from Walgreen Boots Alliance and own other drug distribution companies like World Courier and quite a lot of others as well. The Endpoint engineering team seem mostly involved with integrating acquisitions into the main AB network. The Alliance Health network is quite complex and needs a lot of work to get integrated into the main organisation’s network.
I’m actually quite excited to start working at AB. For me, there were two things that attracted me to the job. The first was going back to working for an internal IT department, rather than have to keep my head in four places at once like I did with Advanced. The other thing that appealed to me was just the sheer scale of the organisation. In terms of numbers alone, they’re at least eight times bigger than any organisation I’ve ever worked for or on behalf of and I’ve not worked for a multinational company like this either. For them, the things that attracted them to me was my broad range of experience got from working in education, plus what I’ve learned about Intune with Advanced and SCCM over the last ten or so years with LSFC and Habs.
I enjoyed my time working at Advanced. They’re a good company to work for, their benefit package is reasonably generous, advancement prospects within the part of the company that I worked in are good, they care about their staff and I enjoyed working with my colleagues. They did nothing wrong but the offer that AB made was too tempting so I’m glad I made the choice to move on.
So, um, yeah, happy at the moment 🙂
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