Faces of Nelnet: Eric Herbert, IT Manager, 5280 Solutions

Eric Herbert, IT Manager, 5280 Solutions

Dawn Knight:

What are you most proud of with your department?

Eric Herbert: I’m most proud of my team’s commitment to the internal customer. They truly care about keeping the organization productive and satisfied with their technology solutions.

Dawn: Please describe a typical day for you.

Eric: I usually make breakfast for my kids as my dad always made sure we had a hot breakfast growing up and I suppose this is sort of a tribute to him. I then whine to my wife that I’m running late and ask her to make me coffee. After managing my way around the 125 emails that are inbound on a daily basis I try to balance my time between “transactional” activities like budget, invoices and project deliverables and “transformational” activities centered around leadership or process improvements.

Dawn:What has been your biggest challenge work-wise over the past 12 months?

Eric: Finding ways to keep myself and my team focused on building a more secure, efficient and dependable infrastructure while saddled with all of the daily fire fighting and escalation noise that happens when you support 2000 associates!

Dawn: If a school asks you what you do for Nelnet that impacts them, what would you say?

Eric: My team is responsible for providing all of our employees technology that allows them to do their customer-facing jobs in the best way possible while also ensuring that all of our trusted data is safe and secure.

Dawn: If you could have dinner with anyone on the planet, who would that be and what would you order?  

Eric: I would have dinner with my wife in Hawaii because that would mean I finally had a vacation and we rarely get to go to dinner alone! We would order a mountain of fresh seafood including poke, uni, grilled swordfish.

Dawn: What is one piece of clothing you just can’t live without?

Eric: My soccer cleats.

Dawn: What was your very first job?

Eric: Mowing lawns for neighbors.

Dawn Knight, Rocky Mountain & Western Regional Director (AZ, CO, ID, NV, ND, OR, WA, WY), Nelnet Partner Solutions