Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional
John White | Nick Korte
Podcast
Episodes
Listen, download, subscribe
Do the Prep Work: Keep Your Eyes Open when Career DR Planning with David Klee (2/2)
How prepared are you for a career emergency like losing a job? Disaster recovery plans for your career, just like troubleshooting, start with good documentation of technical and business accomplishments. David Klee returns in episode 316 to share the prep work required for building and testing a disaster recovery plan for our careers. You’ll learn how to use David’s technique of looking in the mirror (inside yourself) and out the window (out into the world / greater technical community) to quiet the fear and document and identify transferable skills that can be listed on a resume, on LinkedIn, or shared in a job interview. As we talk through each topic or recommendation, David shares concrete examples from his experience to illustrate how they apply. Original Recording Date: 01-20-2025 David Klee is a returning guest and the owner and chief architect at Heraflux Technologies. If you missed part 1 of this discussion series with David, check out Episode 315. Topics – Keep Your Eyes Open with the Mirror and the Window, Accomplishments as Repeatable Processes, Transparent Outcomes and the Hero’s Journey, Avoiding the Cold Start with Prep Work, Testing a Career DR Plan 3:28 – Keep Your Eyes Open with the Mirror and the Window We all have intentions of keeping disaster recovery plans for our careers and lives up to date, but we fall short. “The tech side is arguably the easier part. DR for the career, especially in this day and age…if you get cut today…what are you going to do? What’s the next step? Are you ready to take an unplanned detour in life? Who do you know? What do you know? What have you done that you can talk about or reference to help you get the next leg up? What have you done that’s so proprietary that you can’t mention a spec of it or it’s so proprietary that it doesn’t transfer out of that job?” – David Klee, on disaster recovery for your career David talks about his first job in college working for a market research firm. The firm had a platform with its own scripting language that could be used to build websites or surveys. David acted as an intermediary between the team that built the platform and the team that used it. “I spent three years there. What did I learn? I learned how to script in a language that does not leave that company borders. That’s not a good career builder unless you intend to stay with that company for your entire career, and this is the 2020s. Good luck with that.” – David Klee John says this could be something we could ask about in an interview. A company is basically asking for an employee to be a captive of that group because of the proprietary nature of the language. David says in most cases like this an employee will not know it until they are in the situation. "It takes keeping your eyes open…no matter how much you enjoy your job…is the captivity of this job worth it? Is there job security? Do I enjoy what I’m doing? Am I growing, or am I just moving laterally? What’s worth it? " – David Klee In this job at the market research firm, they found out David was a good troubleshooter, and they wanted him to fix bugs on the platform others had built. Even when David proposed that it would be faster to rebuild the platform on newer versions of software, they insisted he focus on patching the existing platform. What does David mean by keeping your eyes open? “Keeping your eyes open involves looking at yourself in a mirror. And then, look out the window.” – David Klee David says to look in the mirror we should think about what we want to do, what we enjoy doing, and what we do and don’t like about our current job. Early in his career, he wanted to break out of just being an IT worker. He wanted to be a business driver rather than part of a cost center. “Look at your value to the business. Am I there just keeping the lights on? And what about that do you enjoy?” – David Kleep Looking out the window involves thinking about what you’re doing, what you’re getting paid, and how much you’re appreciated by the business. What are you doing that can be transferred to another business of any size, and how much satisfaction of doing your current job would be retained in making a move? “You don’t have a lot of answers when you’re just starting out, but that’s where you start talking to people. Find people in that area of any specialty, be it IT or whatever, that you enjoy, and there’s probably a community around it. I got lucky. I found the SQL Server community in 2008…. Here’s a room of 50 other people that enjoy the same exact thing. This is cool, and I can talk about it with them.” – David Klee Someone David knew well started a SQL Server user group in Omaha, Nebraska. David found out about the group and was there for the very first meeting. David got to know the community around a specific technology. He would ask people where they work, what they did each day, what they did and did not like about their job, what they wished they could do more of, etc. “You’re getting paid twice as much…interesting. So, there’s less that I don’t like in that role. There’s more of the stuff that I like, and your company gives you time to focus on the stuff that you like to do. Ok, let’s talk. Who do you know, and do you have an opening in your company? …or, I’m not there yet qualification-wise to be able to get that job, but hey, you do this stuff day in and day out. What can I do to learn more? What can I do to push myself? If the company that I’m at is just focused on keeping the lights on, what can I do on the side to grow? …it’s that want to grow and do more that not everybody has…. How can I learn everything that I need to know to go beyond an IT Operations lightkeeper kind of role? What can I do to help the company see the value in IT to invest further in it?” – David Klee, giving examples of what we might talk to others about at a community meeting David considers himself a lifelong learn who wants to know as much about everything as he possibly can. 9:41 – Accomplishments as Repeatable Processes David talked about being a cost center compared to being a business driver. John says at the individual contributor level, the delineation may come down to what you’re working on. Are the systems for the company or a specific product that is customer facing? David says think about how much money the business makes per day because you kept a system up and running. When David worked for a performing arts center, he saw the business need for improvement in volunteer management for each show. David also wanted to learn how to program in .NET and took it upon himself to build a volunteer management system. He knew nothing about .NET and worked on this project outside of his normal work week to beat the deadline for the next season opening. “I built a volunteer management system. It integrated with the ticketing system. The house managers could hit a button, open a show directly from the ticketing system. It pre-filled and populated everything. They had templates for all the positions they needed…. The first week it went live it saved 55 staff hours between 2 people. That was cool…. That’s the resume builder right there, and that actually enabled me to get my next job…. That’s the resume builder because not only did you learn a tech skill…but it showed that you can think about the business and not just a tech feature.” – David Klee, describing the outcome of his work building a new volunteer management system John emphasizes the need for quantification so the next person looking to hire you can understand your value to the organization. Saving that many staff hours per performance translates to dollars. David says this allowed 2 people working 80-hour weeks to work only 50 hours per week. Nick highlights an irony. Many companies do not have enough systems documentation to troubleshoot effectively when there is a problem. When we are applying for a job, we need documentation that indicates our expertise level to be deemed competent enough to go and work on a system which a company may not have documented well. But, if we do not document our own experience well, we have a problem! We have to be able to prove our competence and experience to another company. We might be able to succeed in a technical interview by answering questions, but we need proof of our expertise. Companies may want us to do and not document, but around performance review time documentation becomes critically important. This is at odds with the overall culture as it relates to documentation. “And the documentation onus is on you. They’ll never give you the time to document your successes because they don’t want you to jump ship and bring that list of successes with you. So it’s on you. How much time do you have nights and weekends to keep up on this stuff? You have to make the time.” – David Klee, on documenting our accomplishments / successes How detailed should the list of our own successes / accomplishments be? David says it should be detailed enough to make it repeatable, keeping in mind we cannot take proprietary information from a company. David says the knowledge of building a volunteer management system has stuck with him over time. He has built web applications ever since. “The framework has changed. The foundation has changed. But the knowledge of how to take a business challenge, justify and quantify the impact of solving it technically, implementing it, and then measuring the outcome…if you can document that, that’s what you need for the proof…. What did you do and why did you do it? Give me 3 sentences on how you did it and then tell me the outcome.” – David Klee, on documenting accomplishments According to Nick, getting the refined outcome statement for your resume for an interview takes writing down your accomplishments a couple of d
Nerd Journey: Career Advice for the Technology Professional RSS Feed
