First 30 days: Local and lab environments built; oriented on the CCT stack; handling internal IT and enablement tickets with review
First 60 days: Completing a full server environment build in lab independently; running Data Bridge deployments and upgrades in client environments with light supervision
First 90 days: Owning a client environment build end-to-end, leading a client IT kickoff call, and handling standard support tickets without review
New Systems Consultants work through a structured 90-day plan with a defined milestone checklist, shadowing time with each member of the team, and a specialty track chosen with your manager (networking, database, integrations, or internal IT.
How We Expect You to Think
This is the part of the job we care most about, and it’s the part that’s hardest to teach.
Our documentation is good, and you will use it. However, a runbook cannot tell you why step 6 exists, what it assumes about the client’s network, or what to do when the environment in front of you doesn’t match the one the runbook was written against. Working through the steps without understanding the mechanism behind them is how a build passes every checkbox and still fails at go-live.
What that looks like day to day:
Understand the why before the how. You should be able to explain what a linked server actually does, why a VPN tunnel needs matching phase-2 selectors, or why a service account failed after a password policy change — not just recall the fix that worked last time.
Diagnose, don’t guess. Read the error. Check the log. Form a hypothesis, test the one thing that would disprove it, and narrow from there. Restarting services and re-running the installer until something changes is not troubleshooting.
Know when you’re outside what you understand. Being unsure is fine and expected — this stack is deep. Pretending otherwise in front of a client’s IT director is not. Ask, escalate, or go read, then come back with an answer you can defend.
Improve the process you inherited. When you find a gap, an undocumented step, or a step that exists only because someone once did it that way, say so and fix it. We would rather hear “this instruction is wrong and here’s why” than watch it get followed for another two years.
Be genuinely curious. The people who do well here take apart systems they’ve never seen because they want to know how they work, not because a ticket forced them to.