How To Get An IT Job In Canada: College Stories 5/6 — co-op@Nokia

As I mentioned last time, the second co-op story is about Nokia. Before I start, let me show you where we are at now.

Semester 1 → Semester 2 → Semester 3 → Co-op 1 → Co-op 2 → Semester 4
(click on the previous story if you want to check out)

You probably know of Nokia that used to make a solid cellphone. Nokia is now more focusing on networking infrastructure toward 5G. Here are reasons why I wanted to join Nokia.

• Located in Kanata: Ottawa is a huge city and many big tech companies are located in west side of Ottawa called Kanata including Cisco, Ericsson, Ciena, Blackberry, Ford, and so on. This would be a great chance to work around them.
• Networking: My program is heavily focused on Java and we don’t learn other fields that much as it’s only two year program. Luckily, there’s a course called ‘Networking Programming’ on the third semester and this comes to me fascinating about how networking works behind the scene. I was interested in IoT and 5G at that time.
• Big Company: Nokia is definitely one of big companies in Ottawa. If you can get your foot in the door, you will have better chance to similar or bigger sized companies.

Welcome email from Nokia

I was working as an NPI Lab Support for the second co-op. By the way, NPI stands for New Product Introduction. This isn’t a typical position from my program because it’s more like Network Technician job. What I worked here was quite a lot to list but the most important task was managing network labs. What it means by taking care of labs is that we build network based on engineer or customer’s topology. Also we maintain and troubleshoot all of them in the labs.