Watching Chesapeake's Senior Consultant-Instructor Kennedy Clark in front of the classroom or on site with a client, you would think that networking has always been part of his life. That is not the case. Kennedy graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in business and an emphasis in finance. Upon graduation, he received an offer with GE Information Services and went through their corporate training program which included financial and information management.
The Information Management program provided Kennedy comprehensive technical training including C and assembly language development of business communication applications and accounts receivable applications. Kennedy spent the majority of his time programming and developing a proprietary Email system that GE was selling to the marketplace. Like most large corporate companies, Kennedy found himself moving within the company every six months and that provided him the opportunity to hone his computer skills. He specialized on mainframe and database development.
Next, Kennedy ran a team concentrating on a financial consolidation product. As the Project Manager, Kennedy combined his business degree and his technical background to manage all aspects of the project from pre-sales to the implementation of the product. He designed and developed LEX2000 utility applications in C and C++ as well as developing and teaching the LEX2000 financial consolidation system training classes. Kennedy managed installation of sophisticated, enterprise-wide, LAN-based financial software and kept "bumping into NetWare" when installing the system at the client site. A believer in training, Kennedy persuaded management to let him take some courses in CNE training through a training partner that focused on Novell. At the same time GE announced that it had been sold.
With the sale of the company, Kennedy accepted a management position with one of GE's then thirteen different business units "that really very few had anything to do with electricity." GE's Information Services division relied on a Novell infrastructure and had 80-85 Novell servers with multi-protocols such as: IPX, TCP/IP, and AppleTalk. Kennedy was able to see first hand how large corporations work and decided that he did not want to take that career path. Coincidentally during this time, Kennedy took a "free seat" in a GE custom class on Cisco routers. He became enthused and decided that this is definitely where he wanted to concentrate his energy and talents. He decided to make a move and began working for a training company teaching Cisco courses.
Kennedy came to Chesapeake in February 1997. He was hired to focus on ATM and Switching, not only from a teaching perspective, but also in the consulting arena. "I enjoy working with people and seeing the students 'get it,'" admits Kennedy. "I have never seen another company that has an affinity for hiring such talented people. Chesapeake takes consulting very seriously. You can do consulting without teaching, but I don't think you can teach without consulting. The combination of the two has such strong synergies they really build on each other." Kennedy is taking his consulting experiences to the classroom and spear-heading Cisco's new Catalyst 5000 Series Configuration Course (C5SC), which Chesapeake will offer in January 1998. Kennedy is developing an additional day of switch troubleshooting, which Chesapeake will offer in conjunction with the C5SC course. This extra day will provide students with hands-on labs focusing on real world issues such as updating the Cisco operating system and recovering passwords. "We want to go in-depth on some of the fast ethernet and ATM. We will have troubleshooting, tuning and real world tasks, because that is what the students have been asking for and that is what we believe to be high value added."
Kennedy cites that some of his challenging consulting assignments have come from the classroom. Based on one of Chesapeake's custom classes that Kennedy was teaching, Chesapeake was asked to bid on a task oriented project utilizing Cisco's Lightstream 1010 ATM and Catalyst 5000 switches. Chesapeake is currently assisting with the implementation of this design.
Between teaching, developing proprietary labs for the C5SC, and consulting, Kennedy will be getting married at the end of November.