Meet our Experts: Spotlight on Victor Kemp
At Vox, we value, support and actively engage people with the levels of expertise that we require to keep us moving forward as a company. In this edition of ‘Meet our Experts’, we find out more about Vox Training Facilitator, Victor Kemp, who sincerely enjoys the successful ‘lightbulb moments’ that take place regularly with his learners as he strives to pass on knowledge and understanding in the workplace. He also has some really interesting travel tales to share…
Did you hear the story about the Government IT Systems Audit that involved a close call – a VERY close call – with a very angry hippo?
If you didn’t, that’s because you haven’t had the pleasure of sitting down with Vox Training Facilitator, Victor Kemp, for a chat about his life and what makes him tick.
[Editor’s note: Or maybe that should be: ‘What makes him MikroTik?’ This will seem much funnier later in the article. 😊]
The answer – to the question ‘What makes him tick?’ – seems to involve travel wherever possible, a life-long love of both learning AND teaching, playing with words as his default setting and a moderate amount of good Scotch (although never to excess).
Join us as we unpack some of the highlights of Being Victor Kemp (but not ‘Being John Malkovic’, which is a different kind of review!) in another chapter of People of Vox.
‘To China, my China!’ …A Non‑Linear Path to Vox
Victor has been part of the Vox family for nearly two decades, celebrating his 20th anniversary of working for the company in December 2026. He’s based in Pretoria as a Training Facilitator now, after starting his career in the Vox Service Centre taking phone calls to help customers with their IT challenges.
Victor says he especially enjoys turning technical complexity into plain language, making learning feel like something people can look forward to. In a nutshell, you could say that his curiosity, persistence and a willingness to learn on the job have helped him to build a long and varied career at Vox.
His route into the tech and training world didn’t follow a straight line, but it was certainly interesting! After finishing high school, he went to university to study law but left when it started to feel wrong for him. “After this,” he says, “I took on a string of odd jobs, which included running a video store, selling stoneware crockery and being a production runner on movie sets.”
During this early and varied phase of his career, Victor also had some interesting encounters with some of Africa’s biggest game animals, which unfortunately decided to show their grumpy sides. During one encounter, he was driving foreign tourists around South Africa when, in the Kruger National Park, he had an interesting experience testing his reversing skills – at speed, for quite some distance – away from an angry elephant.
On another occasion, he was in a tiny fragile boat – with a significant leak, which was to prove problematic – en route to a small Botswana government office in the middle of the Okavango Delta. When he got there, he was scheduled to audit the IT equipment.
Unfortunately, while they were still en route, he and his guides crossed paths with an angry and territorial hippo, after they had cut the engine to briefly stop and to bail out some of the water leaking into the boat. Fortunately, the engine re-started and they managed to get away just in time!
His philosophy of life following on from those experiences became pragmatic: ‘Live your life fully, but don’t be reckless!’ Those close‑call moments later helped him to deal with challenges with humour and perspective: traits that were later to help him at Vox when liaising with customers or carrying out training.
Perhaps a little scarred by his encounters with grumpy elephants and hippos in the African bush, Victor then found himself entering the teaching profession. He explains: “I completed a TEFL course – Teaching English as a Foreign Language – which then, in turn, opened up a job opportunity to teach in China for around a year.”
[Editor’s note: China is far away from grumpy African elephants and hippos; could it be a coincidence?]
Returning to Pretoria, he continued for another few years with teaching English as a second language, now at a small school for the children of foreign diplomats, before finding an unexpected opening at Vox in its newly opened Service Centre.
“It was a bit of a happy accident!” Victor says of joining Vox. He didn’t arrive with an IT diploma, but he was enthusiastic and ready to learn.
“I had to learn everything on the job, which presented some initial challenges,” he explains. “It was back in the internet dial-up days, when I didn’t even really know what a dial-up modem was, other than that we had one at home, and it made strange noises and got you a very slow connection to the internet.”
His willingness to take on long hours, new tasks and unfamiliar challenges is what got Victor his foot in the Vox door. His perseverance and tenacity – as well as his ongoing ability to keep learning and reinventing himself when required – is what then helped him to achieve the accolade of working for the company for two decades.
Learning Fast: From Dial‑Ups to Level 5…
Victor’s work today combines his ability to embrace technology with the communication skills of the teacher, but he says that dealing with the tech was initially quite daunting. He remembers the early days of the Service Centre as involving slow connections and having lots to learn!
He started as a level 1 call‑centre engineer, the person who answers the phone to help customers needing assistance. He then decided to work towards attaining an advanced technical role. By embracing the technology involved in this learning curve, and pushing himself hard, Victor was able to complete the training requirements in three years instead of the usual five.
“I’m proud of this achievement,” he says, “because I worked hard for it! I put in some long hours and experienced some challenging on‑the‑job learning moments, but it was worth it.”
…And Back to Teaching
After several years in this advanced technical position, Victor realised that frontline technical support wasn’t his long‑term calling. His teaching background resurfaced as an ideal complement to his technical experience.
Encouraged by colleagues who recognised his strengths, he moved into internal training and then into managing Vox’s e‑learning offering, which allows employees to tap into technical knowledge and training easily and conveniently.
“Most of what I’d like my job to be about is ‘moulding minds’, but it does come with a lot of admin!” he laughs. “My favourite part of my job is the moment when a learner’s face changes: when confusion becomes clarity. That’s the reward. It’s that light bulb going off.”
These days, his role involves more than standing in front of a classroom. He designs training programmes, coordinates mandatory compliance and product courses, and handles back‑end admin. His ability to take complex technical material and make it easier to understand is important in his work with hardware certifications and product knowledge, especially his role in in-house MikroTik training.
MikroTik routers are highly-regarded hardware products that are used to direct network traffic, secure connections and manage internet access for homes and businesses.
Some years back, Victor went to Latvia – situated in Northern Europe and one of the three Baltic states – to earn his international MikroTik certification there, and he now runs those programmes himself, which was a move that embedded this capability within Vox.
“Latvia was an awesome country to visit,” he says enthusiastically. “I took some leave after the training and explored some of the country at my own cost; it was a wonderful experience!”
Away from the technicalities of MikroTik training, Victor is deeply invested in Vox’s ‘Friday Bites Live’ or FBL.
[Editor’s Note: the name is reminiscent of ‘Saturday Night Live / SNL’ – Victor enjoys puns and word play.]
It’s a weekly half-hour online learning slot, when Vox employees around the country learn about products and policies while enjoying friendly rivalry and sharing jokes. It gives Vox product managers a regular turn in the spotlight, which is always followed by a fun quiz for points, bragging rights and prizes.
“Friday Bytes Live is definitely one of the highlights of my training week,” says Victor. “I enjoy the planning and preparation and then running it. My goal is to have 700 people and upwards in attendance every week – we’ve come very close, hitting the high 600s, but reaching 700 and then staying there consistently is a prime goal of mine.”
[Editor’s note: If FBL can reach higher participation numbers, it means more colleagues are engaged in learning and sharing knowledge, which is what Victor is passionate about.]
“I also enjoy the excellent energy and positivity that FBL brings to a Friday morning,” he continues. “It’s like our CEO, Jacques du Toit, always says: that dealing with positive people is energising. I think it’s important to try and find the silver linings when you can.
“The other thing that really helps is that I also have a fantastic team around me, with colleagues who are always willing to help and support each other, bounce ideas around, and take on new challenges. It’s true camaraderie.”
Challenges, Innovation and Flexibility
Outside work, Victor collects single malt whiskies and has become quite an expert on the topic. It’s all in moderation, though: “I have whiskeys that have been open in my cupboards for 15 to 20 years!” he clarifies. He’s also inspired by scenic travel opportunities and has spent time in various countries in Africa, South America and Europe, including multiple visits to Switzerland on more than one occasion.
“My late mom was South African with Swiss missionary roots, and so through her, I also speak a little French. I thoroughly enjoyed visiting Switzerland a few times in my past – I find its beautiful scenery to be really good for the soul.”
He aims to continue travelling whenever he can in the future, and hopes one day to be able to say that he has visited every continent: an ambition that reflects his ongoing appetite for variety and experience.
“I like to challenge myself,” he says. “I don’t like getting bored. So anytime that I can learn something new, that’s good. And that’s a wonderful thing about working at Vox: there’s always something where you can stick up your hand and continue developing yourself.
“I think it’s such a great quality about Vox as a company: the fact that we have people who are so flexible and innovative, and so willing to give others a chance. I’m proud of Vox, and immensely proud to work for a company that always shows a willingness to innovate and learn, and not stay static.”
Victor believes that this culture of learning is exactly what keeps people at the company, because there are always chances to grow, to try new roles and to contribute beyond the confines of a single job description.
From those early days of changing roles and regularly reinventing himself, it seems safe to say that Victor has finally settled into a workplace that offers him ongoing stability, together with the new challenges and learning opportunities that his busy brain continues to crave.
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