Communication Support Specialist, Minnesota Power

My name is Aaron Stolp, I am a communications support specialist at Minnesota Power, here in Duluth Minnesota. The communications portion of that title actually has to do with network communications infrastructure. So it has to do with a lot of routers, switches, things like that that make the internet work across the company, basically. As well as telephone systems and things like that. So that's where communication comes into the title. However, there is a lot of communicating involved with my role, because there's coordination of projects and equipment installs between different departments and various sites of ours. As well as working with the vendors that we purchase from. An interesting project would be coordinating the work to create wifi in an outdoor environment at one of our sites. So all of the workers outside have wifi access for all of the equipment and gear that they use. Now, when I do these projects, I'm not tech savvy, technology's not my background. But, I'm in that department not for the tech side of it, but for the coordination piece and to be able work with vendors, manage the contracts that we have with them, there's a lot of that that I'm involved with. And I work closely with purchasing as well. There are a lot of software maintenance contracts that we have, a lot, more than you could imagine, daily there are renewals that have to be done, on annual commitments and those usual go across my desk before they get back to the vendor to be paid. It's not linear at all, juggling is a better description of it, because there are software renewal requests that might come in at 7:30 in the morning and then before I get through those, by 8:15 one of our remote sites that expecting a new internet install had a vendor not show up, so I'm calling that vendor. It's all about prioritizing, if something by my judgment needs attention more than something else that's what I am working on.