Smic Director of IT Interview

Interviewed Nov 2009 in Pudong, Shanghai (China) (took 2 days)

This position was for the school division. The process for other parts of the company may be different.

There was a detailed phone interview first. They asked detailed questions about previous experience that were relevant to the work. Since this is an overseas assignment, they also wanted to understand why I was going to China and what my long term plans were.

During the in-person interview, You meet with several people on staff which ask technical questions about various aspects of the work. Since this was IT Director, you don't need to be an expert in every field but you are expected to able to talk intelligently about things like, Active Directory, Exchange, Web technology, Software systems, Databases as well as have a basic understanding about hardware.

The IT department at the school is very broad and further encompasses systems like phone systems, av systems, pa systems, security systems and so on. It is best to have a general understanding about these systems so that you can talk intelligently about them. Again, they don't require expertise in every system but you have to be able to demonstrate that you can manage projects and vendors in all these areas.

Finally, this is a very bi-lingual (Chinese / English) environment. Some of the staff only speaks Chinese and some of the staff only speaks English so it would be very difficult to hold this senior a position without having a good command of both languages.