Tell us about your job and what it involves
Hello, I'm Vicky Messer and my job is Vice President of product management at PICOCOM and we work on technology for 5G chips. My job involves understanding what the product requirements are and specifying them and working with the engineering teams and also providing product collateral for those products to sell to customers and partners.
How did you get there – what’s your career journey been so far?
So I started my career about 30 years ago, having graduated doing electronics degree at York University and I took a graduate job as an RF engineer at Motorola in Swindon, working on 2G base stations. And then after that, I had some time bringing up children for a few years and then joined Alcatel-Lucent again, but working on 3G base stations. And then after that, I decided to move to a start-up company called called Picochip. And there I moved into product management and product marketing for 3G chip sets. And again, I moved jobs partly because of acquisition, et cetera. So it's not always easy. And moved to Icera NVIDIA working on 4G modems. And then finally, I've been working at PICOCOM on 5G systems.
What do you enjoy most about your job / the sector?
What I really enjoy about. the job I'm in at the moment is the interaction I have with customers, partners, the engineering team, the sales team. It's a very varied job. It involves travelling, involves going to conferences. So it's not all in the office, it's not all sitting at a desk. and it's...in a small start-up company, you do make a difference as well and, and what you, what you contribute, makes a difference. You can take on more work. you know, sort of, it's, it's very, you, you need to be responsive and agile to the problems that you're solving. And you can make a real difference and that can be very satisfying.
What would you like people to know about working in telecoms and connectivity?
So in the 30 years that I've been working in the telecoms industry, it's not always been easy. There's been acquisitions, redundancies, but there's always been jobs to go to. And, and every time I've made a change to my job, there's been, you know, it's been a very satisfying, I've learned new skills and a lot of those I use in my role now, the experience that I gained from working in the lab, et cetera really helps in a more senior role.
