About PEARSON

Pearson is the world’s leading learning company, with 40,000 employees in more than 80 countries working to help people of all ages to make measurable progress in their lives through learning. With revenues over €5.2 billion in 2013 we provide learning materials, technologies, assessments and services to teachers and students in order to help people everywhere aim higher and fulfill their true potential. We put the learner at the center of everything we do.

We at Pearson Lanka, a core part of Pearson's global Learning Technologies team. We build and manage some of the industry leading cloud based learning platforms that serve millions of students across the world. Over the years, we have built a strong Agile Development team, and we are now looking to expand aggressively over the next 12 months.  The industry leading cloud-based technology platforms of Pearson help educate more than 30 million students across the globe.

The 360+ strong engineering team based out of the Colombo office works dedicatedly to service Pearson technology companies located in North America and Australia.

At Pearson, we aim to be the best company to work for in the world. It is part of our philosophy to provide benefits, profit share plans, development opportunities and a culture that beats anywhere else. If you are 'always learning', and have a passion for technology and creativity, send in your resume and join our exciting engineering culture.

 

Senior Operations Specialist

Pearson develops and operates web based learning and content delivery systems for higher education and curriculum use.  Operations Technical Services is hiring a Senior Operations Specialist to improve the quality of service delivered by Pearson Technology Operations.  The Sr. Operations Specialist will join a team of Operations professionals responsible for the support of our production platforms.  This team helps to ensure 24/7/365 delivery of our hosted application products to its customers.

The Senior Operations Specialist receives requests for incident escalation from customer support staff, service alerts from monitoring systems or reports from internal staff.  The specialist performs diagnosis of system and software components to identify root cause, takes or recommends corrective action or escalates for resolution.

-  Issue triage includes reproducing errors (product use, data issue, connectivity issue, and/or application malfunction) and collecting detailed application and system information and, if necessary, escalating to Operations Administrators, product management and/or vendors.

-  Diagnosis includes using web-based administration tools, basic network and application health assessment, exercising various applications, and examining knowledge base repositories.

-  Corrective action includes the use of web-based administration tools, thoroughly documenting issues and their resolution using a Service Management System such as ServiceNow, email and other office productivity tools.

The Senior Operations Specialist communicates with customer support staff and may occasionally communicate directly with sales staff and customers.  The specialist will work with Operations management, technical project management, software engineers and partner vendors to enlist help to resolve complex issues.  The specialist also works with product management teams to provide advice on critical enhancements for reliability of Pearson products software and communicates details of product/platform releases to the Operations team.

Supervisory responsibilities: The Sr. Operations Specialist will fulfill a leadership role by reviewing work, managing resources, mentoring staff and defining expectations.  The Sr. Operations Specialist will be a functional product subject-matter expert and help establish protocols for supporting many of Pearson’s highly integrated products and platforms.

 

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Working with diverse web-based applications and learning management systems in a production, mission critical environment diagnosing complex user, application and/or systems problems
• Acquiring a deep understanding of Pearson platform applications at the operational level to become the subject matter expert for other departments including product management, engineering, product support and others
• Identify opportunities for  reducing  downtime to minimize customer impact
• Working with various teams to prepare for supporting new and/or highly integrated products and platforms
• Identify needs for additional support documentation  and work with management to provision the resources necessary to write the documentation
• Monitoring the daily operations of the enterprise application environment by analyzing information and recommending short and long term automation opportunities
• Ensuring support issues are assigned and resolved in a timely and efficient manner
• Coordinate urgent business needs with the team to insure they receive the necessary attention
• Identify and manage operations projects as needed
• Develop, maintain, and facilitate process training for team members
• Lead transition of new or updated platforms into production support including guiding Dev teams through the Operational Readiness Checklist be point of contact for questions, work with managers to coordinate assignments for creating ops guides, Coordinate training sessions given by Dev teams
• Provide first point of contact for business units, Client Services and Customer Support  inquiries into aging tickets and secondary priority setting
• Work with managers to coordinate knowledge transfer amongst tiered escalation teams
• Analyze incident case data to identify trends and work with development and software quality teams to prioritize fixes.

 

REQUIRED KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE:

• Strong leadership skills with supervisory experience
• Desire to mentor staff in process and platforms
• Prior experience with IT customer service/customer communications
• Experience with Service Management systems such as ServiceNow
• Ability to identify areas for continuous improvement with processes, tools, and training, based on business needs and company growth
• Ability to effectively multi-task on a variety of daily work assignments in a challenging, fast-paced work environment
• Excellent oral and written business communication, organizational and time management skills
• Experience with documentation of complex issues, processes, procedures
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Ability to understand and clearly explain technical issues to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Strong team player with the ability to work independently
• Motivation to learn and share expertise of new skills and technologies
• 3-5 years of experience, BS in business, computer science, or other technical discipline
• ITIL Foundations Certified

 

PREFERRED SKILLS:

• Some experience with SQL query and understanding of relational database concepts
• Some experience with networking, systems administration

Please submit your CV using the following link http://pearsonlankavacancies.peopleshr.com/