I have an interview tomorrow with a company that does hosting/management of a VoIP/SIP environment for a piece of specialty telecom hardware that can be best described as a key system on steroids. The company manufactures the hardware and provides various backing services, right up to a SaaS offering that fully manages the endpoint hardware and the whole voice environment.
I have no direct, hands on experience in this environment. I have some familiarity with the technology (I have my CCNA and was studying for my Collaboration when I got the call from the recruiter), but my work experience so far has been helpdesk in various places. Right now I'm helpdesk at an ISP, so I actually see a VoIP network in operation every day, but the real backend operation is mostly hidden from me and everything I've learned out of it I've had to tear, still beating, from the chest of the tools I deal with as part of the helpdesk triage process (while my current employer tries hard to implement a policy of least necessary privilege, the implementation is imperfect, so I've been able to poke around in a lot of places I am not necessarily supposed to be able to).
The new company seems to understand the situation, they know I don't have direct engineering experience here, but they know I have that familiarity and a great deal of enthusiasm. They seemed to really like me on the phone interview, right down to when I talked about a nerdy fascination with SS7 (irrelevant to the job, but I was hoping it would highly my interest in telephony). I don't think that'll be a problem, they are happy to give me training on their specific product and seem to be OK with starting me slow on some of the basic stuff (adding users and lines, only assisting more senior techs and engineers on reactive troubleshooting and proactive hardening, rather than leading anything yet).
But I'm still a bit nervous. I've always been in the customer facing helpdesk world, I've wanted desperately to get into the data center for a while now. I've studied hard to prepare myself for a role there or somewhere else in operations. I don't want to screw up the opportunity.
What are some important pitfalls to avoid during the interview? I've been researching the product as much as I can (as well as ancillary systems -- recruiter mention both CUCM and Avaya CM), so I feel confident in being able to stay current in a mildly technical discussion. But how deep do I let myself go? I've done a technical interview before, but in a different industry and I was very qualified for the job that time. This time I feel like I'm barely qualified.
What about if, god willing, everything goes well and I get the offer letter? How do I approach the real world, on the job experience of being in network voice operations/engineering? What's the life like? Day to day? Are there important things to keep in mind from day one to avoid screwing up? The role is single-client focused, directly supporting a single, large account. That I do not want to mess up.
I'm not desperately nervous, I've been working hard for a few years to get here and extremely hard over the last few days to be able to show up 100% tomorrow, but I'm nervous enough to ramble on here. Does anyone have any advice?
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