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Own Your IT Career
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Aug 21, 2024
What does it mean to own your IT career? In this video, I discuss my experience learning how to make sure I keep my skills relevant for working in the IT industry. ? Read More About This ? The Most Inspiring PowerShell Story Ever https://web.archive.org/web/20150308234145/http:/donjones.com/2015/03/04/the-most-inspiring-powershell-story-ever/ Book: Own Your Tech Career https://www.manning.com/books/own-your-tech-career ⏰ Chapters ⏰ 00:00 Introduction 00:19 The Most Inspiring PowerShell Story Ever 01:52 My experience owning my career 04:21 Investing in yourself 05:39 Keeping yourself marketable 06:36 Book recommendation 07:13 Summary Social Links ? LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/jeffbrowntech
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0:00
What's up, everyone? Today we have another professional development career type topic in owning your IT career
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This is a lesson I first learned when I embarked on a job search many years ago
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And then several years later, I came across an article that gave a name to that experience
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My name's Jeff. This is Jeff Brown Tech. And let's go ahead and get into it. First, let's take a look at this article by Don Jones. If you don't know who Don Jones is, he's considered the first follower of PowerShell and a major influence in that space
0:29
He has written many books and video courses and actually started the PowerShell and DevOps Summit that goes on every year
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This is a blog post of his. It's no longer up on the internet, so I had to go back to the Wayback Machine and find it, but I'll include a link to it down in the video description
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This article was sent in by an IT professional thanking Don for some advice he had heard from him
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Here at the beginning of the article, the IT veteran describes himself as a quote, button monkey, meaning relying on the gooey and just pressing buttons to get things done
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not really doing anything automation, or doing things very manually. The note continues saying this person discussing a PowerShell session by Don Jones and Jeffrey
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Snowver, who's the inventor of PowerShell, and inspired him to start learning more about
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PowerShell, eventually taking it to where these servers were administered only through PowerShell
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He then continues referencing a PowerShell podcast episode with Jason Helmick, also a big influence
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in the PowerShell space. And Don said this, you have to decide whether your career
1:29
is your company or your career is IT. The person realized that they are only learning and doing things that their company needed
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them to and not learning what they needed to know to make themselves a good IT professional
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And using PowerShell as the example, he really didn't learn it before or see the need of it
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but once he saw the power of it and started learning more about it and eventually changing
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how things were done at his company. I also experienced this many years before actually reading this article when I went searching for a new job I spent nearly five years in a sysadmin role and thought finding a new role was going to be easy I had done lots of Active Directory things
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exchange, system center configuration manager, laptop, desktop imaging, SQL stuff, scripting, and VB script, not PowerShell
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I thought I was a pretty good sysadmin and knew what I was doing
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When I went to go find a new role, I started seeing things like VMware and Citrix and CCNA certification
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things I never really knew about or thought about or, you know, didn't know existed really
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Prior to getting that first cis admin role, I had done things like A plus and Network Plus
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but I basically stopped with certifications after that. I did have a home lab and I'd worked in it less and less the longer I'd been in that same role
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In summary, I had made myself a good cis admin for the company I was working for
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but I was not a good cis admin for what the industry needed to be
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because I had a lot of skills that weren't expected for cisadmins to have at the time
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I hadn't kept up with what was going on in the industry and really had no idea how to go about doing things like that
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When I started searching for a new role, I did an interview with someone, and he asked if I knew anything about PowerShell
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And I said, no, I had done a lot more VB script and written lots of things than that
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And he said, why not? Exchange is built on PowerShell. You should know more about it
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So I took that as a challenge, and I took our user provisioning script, which was written in VBBB
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script, but when we moved to Exchange 2007, the mailbox provisioning portion of it no longer
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worked. I wrote a new script that I could use to enable mailboxes for new users
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And I think that's pretty much everyone's introduction to scripting or PowerShell is
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user creation and deletion automation. That's where I got started and I've been hooked on
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PowerShell ever since. Later on in that same interview, he had asked if I knew anything about
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VMware. And this was like 2012, so still pretty early in virtualization. And I said, no, we don't
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virtualization. He said, well, that doesn't matter. You need to know VMware, because that was the
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staple at the time There a free version You can go download install and learn it And I honestly didn even know one I didn know VMware existed And two I didn know there are free versions of products that you could go get and try out for yourself or at least limited versions of them
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This is where I learned that I needed to be aware of other technologies and learn them, even if they're not skills I was currently using in my role at the time
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Don continues down here in the article at the end saying, your career is yours, not your companies
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You need to learn the important things that are relevant to being an IT professional and working in the IT industry, whether or not your company needs you to do them
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And the big thing here is your company may not even invest in your professional development, and it's something you have to do yourself
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I've bought many online courses for myself to learn a new technology, books, home lab equipment, and now with the cloud, it's even easier
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I have my own Azure tenant that I work in and I make sure I keep cost very low in it, usually about $5 a month
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When I started learning about Azure, this is what I did. When I started learning about Terraform, I would spend things up in Azure that were free or very, very low cost and their usage and then spend them back down
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But I just did this over and over and over. That's how they learned that technology. I'm doing this now with Kubernetes
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It's not a skill requirement for the job I'm currently in. It may be later as we grow
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But I'm working on the certified Kubernetes administrator certification. Hope to take that later this year
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But again, even if it's not relevant in my current role, it could become relevant later on
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Or if I ever find myself looking for a new role, hopefully I can take that certification and say, well, I do know a little bit about it
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Definitely like to apply some practical experience with it. Don ends the article by talking about you never know when your job or your company will cease to exist
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You need to make sure you have marketable skills to make that transition easier into your next role
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You know, this is in 2024. The tech industry has had lots of layoffs the last couple of years
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I know people that have worked at major tech companies for 10 20 plus years They suddenly out of a job and they trying to find that new role The other piece of advice I would have is making sure you don pigeonhole yourself or specialize in just one thing You need to be more of a T shape where you are knowledgeable in lots of things and maybe
6:13
deep in one to three things. I experienced this myself when I specialized in Link and Skype for Business, which eventually
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went into Microsoft Teams. And when I went to try to find a new role working inside Azure, that experience just really
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didn't matter to a lot of employers. They only saw me as a Microsoft
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team's guy. It took a little while to break out of that image that I felt like I had on my resume
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into being more of a cloud Azure type person. If you do know Don Jones, he did write a book many years
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ago called Be the Master that has since morphed into this new book called Own Your Tech Career
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And if you scroll down, one of the things it covers here is before a market ysis to keep your
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tech skills fresh and what we've just been talking about, making sure you're marketable in the job
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industry. I haven't read this particular book yet. Maybe I will someday and we can go
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over it. If you're interested in learning more about how to apply this to your tech career
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I would definitely recommend this book, even though I haven't read it yet because everything Don
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Jones write is awesome because he's really good and been a big helper and mentor in the tech
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community. To summarize, make sure you invest in yourself. I know not everyone can do that because
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things cost money, but there are tons of free resources out there on YouTube and blogs that people
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put out there. And then make sure you're always learning what you need to do to make yourself
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marketable in the tech industry because you never know when your job or company is going to go away
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and you find yourself on the job market and need to find that next role. Anyway, that wraps up
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this video. If you have any questions, I'll definitely try to answer them down in the comments
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or maybe in another video. Thank you for watching and we'll see you next time. Thank you
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