Variety Abounds in Tech Space Jobs

Once thought of as a male-dominated field, technology continues to revolutionize every aspect of everyday life. Supporting marketing channels, site launches, and monitoring applications are a few of the ways those in tech make an impact. However, while many share the field, daily experiences and responsibilities differ. CSC’s Angela “Angie” Dinkins, Jen Mathews, and Jennifer Giroso all have jobs in the tech space, yet have vastly different roles.

Angie is an operations manager and observability manager with Enterprise Technology and has been with CSC for more than six years. Her operations team is responsible for operational technical support of internal and third-party applications. On the observability side, she’s in charge of monitoring infrastructure servers and applications.

Working in tech doesn’t mean you have to know about every technology in every single space, Angie explains. “There’s the tech side and the people side,” she says. “You can be smart and pick up things quickly, but you have to be a good team player. You’re not just on your own, working on projects.” For more than 120 years, CSC has been able to consistently produce superior results due to the collaborative efforts of talented people like Angie. The company is built on teams. “Knowing how my role and daily work rolls up to those strategic priorities is exciting,” Angie says. “It makes me proud to know that the work that I’m doing is important and meaningful to the bigger picture.”

Angie didn’t start out looking for a career in tech. She enrolled in a trade school and learned to program not long after her husband went to school for a career in the field. When she started school, she was worried if she had what it takes to succeed. “But when I got in there and started learning it, it was like oh my goodness, I think I like this,” Angie says. “The job offers that came after graduation validated what I did. I know I did the right thing. I love what I do at CSC.”

Jen is senior technology director and runs the two teams in the Sales and Marketing Technology Group, also known as SmarTech. “One team is responsible for our traditional digital marketing channels, like our websites, emails, social media, and blogs,” Jen says. The other team, she says, is a non-traditional technology team. “It kind of operates like a mini infrastructure team.”

She’s worked at CSC for nearly 20 years and admits that in that time she’s “worn a lot of hats.” She started in the Small Business Unit, helping customers incorporate their businesses and stay in compliance, and she eventually became the trainer for that department. She put her journalism background to use and moved into writing and editing for the Marketing Team, eventually moving on to other jobs in Marketing, including email manager, web manager, and in charge of pay-per-click advertising and search engine optimization.” Like Jen, many CSC employees have gained experience on several teams and departments as they explore the company’s available career growth opportunities.

Jen’s career turned into the tech space about 10 years ago. Back then, the Marketing Department worked with an IT team to make website updates. But at CSC, one of the driving forces behind the company’s success is innovation and working together to find improved processes. Jen saw an opportunity to make the process of website updates more agile. “I remember saying at the time that we could do it ourselves. So we selected a new content management system, and I taught myself and my team how it worked, and how to manage the servers and databases. And now we do that across multiple environments of more than a dozen websites.”

She says that first project changed the course of things for the Marketing Department at CSC. “We would never be able to be as fast, agile, or forward-thinking as we are today if we hadn’t struck out on our own.” She says things like that content management project can be terrifying as you’re working on them. “It’s important for people considering careers in technology to know you find yourself in situations where you have to take really big risks on new things, and that can be really hard and stressful,” she says. “And you may doubt yourself a lot during the process, but if you can push through it and get to the other side, it can be very rewarding.”

Jennifer is new to her technology role at CSC, having recently completed Zip Code Wilmington, a 12-week program where people learn how to code. Zip Code is one of several organizations that CSC partners with to hire new talent and help current CSC employees grow professionally. She’s now an associate database administrator in Enterprise Technology, a job she started in September 2021. She started at CSC more than three years ago on the Annual Reports Team.

“It could be that CSC has a fantastic company culture. But everyone I’ve met has been very open and even excited to help,” Jennifer says. She enjoys the daily challenge of her role, adding that there’s always something to learn and a new problem to solve. “One of the things that got me interested in tech was the problem-solving aspect,” she says. “You need to research, use your base knowledge, reach out to your teammates, and whatever else it takes to solve that problem. There’s something new every day because of that.” Being tenacious is one of five values that have been a guidepost for the company, and it has allowed CSC to become a trusted partner to businesses worldwide.