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“I started out in computer engineering, but I found it extremely technical and dull,” said Alex Hernandez (BBA ’05). “I always understood business and how it works and I wanted to be able to integrate business and technology. I think that many people in computer science are focused on the technical and have no business knowledge. And the opposite is also true.”
He found the answer to his quest for an integrated approach in his undergraduate work at in the College of Business Administration, from which he graduated with a major in MIS and a minor in computer science. His parents also are both graduates of Florida International University: his mother with a degree in political science and his father with a degree from the College of Business Administration. Hernandez is a success story in a difficult and highly competitive field. Part of the problem is that to get a job, you have to have experience, he said. But the only way to get that experience is to have a job. Fortunately for Hernandez, he landed a position at the University and then, in August, 2005, moved on to one with Miami-Dade County. “I was taking a class with Gerard Klonarides, lecturer in the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Systems (DSIS), and he had heard of the demand for someone in MIS at the University,” Hernandez said. “I was able to begin at the bottom level to learn PantherSoft and get my initial training.” He did classroom training for faculty and staff and developed online tutorials for them as a refresher. “I already worked most of my undergraduate years, beginning as a programmer in the College where I did some development work for the Knowledge Management Lab with Irma Becerra-Fernandez, associate professor of DSIS and the lab’s founder, before transitioning into PantherSoft,” he said. “I’ve prepared lengthy training guides and have done training in a classroom environment, such as showing people how to use a PeopleSoft tool that generates interactive demos so they can try out procedures in a safe format,” he said. Though he likes teaching, he also likes solitude, which his career choice affords. “I spend many hours developing, which is a solitary activity,” he said. “But I also have the need to communicate, which teaching enables me to do.” Photography has become another way he communicates. It plays into his interest in technical matters, but also goes beyond that.
“I was drawn to photography because I wanted to do something creative,” he said. “As a developer, you can’t think outside the box. You have to follow the rules. And like my interest in integrating technical and business knowledge, photography is another area that requires technical skill and more. You can have all the technical knowledge possible and still not achieve a good photograph.” Hernandez looks ahead to becoming an Oracle partner able to do PeopleSoft training, with his main focus on the financial portion of the package. “Oracle has centers around the country where they train people to implement PeopleSoft at different client locations,” he said. “As much as I like Miami, I have to be willing to travel because though the demand is very high, most of the Oracle implementations here are already done.”
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“MIS is very challenging,” he said. “It’s not for the weak of heart.”
In his work for Miami-Dade County, he has again developed training materials to help employees understand PeopleSoft, Oracle’s proprietary and confidential human resources, financial, and customer relationship management software of which PantherSoft is a version.
While he was a student, he worked for The Beacon and still works for the University’s athletics program. He also had a sports photograph published in The Miami Herald. In addition to taking photographs of events, he does portraits and takes purely creative pictures, such as landscapes and wildlife images.