Network admin plugged into everything Brandon

From Brandon Municipal Airport and the Brandon Sportsplex in the north, through City Hall, the Brandon Police Service and the A.R. McDiarmid Building downtown, to fire halls in the north and south, Zachary Peters is plugged into the City of Brandon.

The network administrator works on behalf of employees throughout the City’s agencies to make sure their computers are working, they’re connected to the network and they’re getting their email.

“I like the atmosphere in the Information Technology department. They’re really good people to work with. It’s a good network to be on and operate. We have a good setup here. It makes things run smoothly,” Peters said.

“You get to see a lot of different things and interact with a lot of different people. It makes the job interesting.”

Peters has worked with his coworkers and the 911 Call Centre to implement changes to the 911 Call Centre hardware. He has worked with the Brandon Municipal Airport and its major tenant, WestJet, on software and hardware upgrades there.

Peters graduated from Network Administration Technology at Assiniboine Community College in 2018.

He found employment in his field right away and feels well-prepared by the courses he took.

“I would say 90 per cent of the stuff I learned is applicable to what I do here,” Peters said.

At the college, he learned about System Centre Configuration Manager, which allows administrators to connect remotely to computers and deploy different applications.

“We don’t have to walk in physically and install software on all the different machines. It makes our lives a lot easier.”

The program also prepared him to work with Domain Name Servers, which allow you to find a website by typing in the name of the company, not an obscure numerical code, and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, a network management protocol that dynamically assigns an IP address and other network configuration parameters to each device on a network.

Prospective students should know that the Network Administration Technology program is demanding, but the instructors are supportive, he said.

“The instructors were really good and professional. They know their information on the courses they teach. The program was more personable than I had expected. You have a lot of time to do your work in class and ask any questions that you had. It just made it a really easy learning environment for me,” Peters said.

Students who are attracted to the field should seriously consider Assiniboine, he said.

“If you feel like that’s something you’re interested in, I would say go for it. It’s two years of your life. It will be a little bit challenging to get through the course,” Peters said.

“If you want to do it and you enjoy working with networks and computers, enjoy routing and different network things like Active Directory Users and Computers (ADUC), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Wireless, it’s definitely a course you should try.”