Getting To Akamai
Lavinia has a bachelor’s degree in Telecoms and Networks and a master’s degree in International Relations. During her last year of university, Lavinia started a job as a Desktop Service Engineer at a clinical research company in Romania, she remained there for 6 years. She was then asked to move to Paris for 3 years to continue her role. After meeting her husband, they moved to London and started working for Rackspace in a similar tech-based role. She then moved to CDN, to start a job as a Customer Support Engineer, this also gave her the opportunity to try her hand at account management. Then, in 2018, she moved to Akamai to start the role that she has today.
About Lavinia’s Career
Lavinia started in the web division at Akamai. Here she learned as much as possible about the customer-facing role.
When she had the opportunity to join the Engagement Management team she grabbed it. Becoming an Engagement Manager was a huge opportunity for Lavinia because it took her out of her comfort zone, and she had to learn a lot about the products on offer. For this role, she had to learn soft skills and technical skills. Thankfully, she has a technical background from her Telecoms and Networks degree and past roles.
Lavina works with Alex on their common customers, read more about Alex here >>
Joining Akamai’s media side was exciting as they have very large companies as customers. The large companies can be challenging, but Lavinia loves the challenge.
Akamai has so many products and they are always introducing new products and features they offer to their customers. You need to have the passion to ask questions and grab opportunities. Questioning customers to understand their needs is key in this role, but it’s not about trying to sell customers the most expensive products, it’s about understanding their needs and trying to fulfil them. Because of this, you need to have a willingness to learn and an ability to learn on the fly.
The Tech Behind Engagement Management
There’s a lot of intelligence and machine learning behind each product at Akamai so it’s really important to understand this to be able to recommend the best product for each customer.
Lavinia says it all comes back to a network! So, understanding the limits of the internet is key in Engagement Management. Akamai has identified the limitations of the internet for big media companies and has developed products to overcome these limitations. Companies who are not using the correct products, will have very slow websites and will take up to a minute to laid – this might not seem like a long time really, but would you wait a minute for a webpage to load?
Understanding terms like BGP, IP address, router and switch are all key in the role so you can talk confidently to customers about the products Akamai sells. It will be easier to do Engagement Management with a technical background but it’s not essential to the role. There are a lot of technical people around you at Akamai who can support you. Engagement Managers are generalists who can delegate jobs to specialists, or they can learn on the job and grow their skillset as they go.
Describe your job in 5 words:
“people, challenges, learning, fun, balanced.”
Watch our IG Live with Lavinia (start at 31:30)
