Alumnus Ron Cascella’s San José State University School of Information course work in web development and digital asset management recently helped him gain a position on the Content Delivery Team at Adobe Systems in Seattle, Washington.

Cascella was hired in April 2011 to support product management and marketing for the large software company, which creates tools such as Adobe Reader, Flash, and Dreamweaver.

As a Web Production Assistant, Cascella is working to transfer digital marketing objects from an internal Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to a delivery publication platform used by the company’s partner organizations. The partner organizations access the platform to retrieve sales information for Adobe products in eight international markets.

Cascella’s job also involves building webpages to display product announcements and information, and he especially credits Dr. Linda Main’s INFO 240: Information Technology Tools and Applications course with teaching him the skills he now uses every day.

“Learning to build webpages and add new components not only taught me about HTML coding but also gave me confidence that I can learn new technologies and new languages fairly quickly,” he explained. “I work with a lot of different kinds of components and systems at Adobe so it’s been very helpful having that background.”

Since many of the marketing assets also contain restricted information, Cascella adds metadata to each object to set access permission levels. He also adds a description for each geographical region to make it easier to organize materials with different languages or country specifications.

To prepare for this career path Cascella took the INFO 282 Seminar in Library Management: Digital Asset Management course with instructor John Horodyski, and spent a semester as a Digital Asset Management Intern working with digital images at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

As a December 2010 graduate and job seeker, Cascella developed tactics to match his experience to the right position. In addition to subscribing to several email lists in the field, he searched online job sites by keywords instead of by job title to find the descriptions that appealed to him. “I searched for ‘metadata,’ ‘digital asset,’ and ‘content,’ which led me to jobs with titles I might not have thought of otherwise,” he said.

Cascella holds an undergraduate degree in archaeology from the University of California Davis, and it was his interest in cultural heritage that led him to the libraries and archives profession. He enrolled in our school’s MLIS program in January 2009 after working for several years in the wine industry.

Cascella offers encouragement to new graduates and job seekers, and said finding a position has a lot to do with luck and good timing. “It was only nine days from the moment I applied for the job to the moment they told me I was hired,” he said. “So it is possible to go from unemployed to employed in about a week!”