Sustaining Your Career

This closing keynote from the LabMan Conference (held at UNT in Denton, TX) follows the conference's theme of "sustainability" by discussing how to sustain one's career.

Transcript

1. Sustaining Your Career
   How to sustain your IT career and your skills in an
   increasingly cloud-centric world
   Scott Lowe
   blog.scottlowe.org
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2. Before we begin
   — Get involved! Audience participation is encouraged and requested.
   — Feel free to take photos or videos of today's presentation and
   share them online
   — If you use Twitter, feel free to tweet about this session (use
   hashtag #LabMan2015 or handle @LabMan2015)
   — A PDF copy of this presentation will be available online after the
   event
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3. Brief background
   — 20 years in the IT industry
   — Authored or co-authored 7 books (2 more books in
   the pipeline)
   — Speaker at events worldwide
   — Been through a couple of major industry transitions
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5. Sustaining your career
   means sustaining yourself
   and sustaining your skills
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6. What do you mean by "sustaining yourself"?
   — Sustaining yourself is different than sustaining your
   skills
   — This is about sustaining your ability and capacity to
   learn, grow, and adapt
   — This is about sustaining your ability to deal with and
   manage change
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7. The only thing that is constant is
   change.
   — Heraclitus
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8. If you dislike change, you're
   going to dislike irrelevance even
   more.
   — Eric Shinseki
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9. Sustaining yourself (continued)
   — Strive to maintain a strong "work-life balance"
   — Pursue learning outside of your career
   — Prolonged bilingualism can improve cognitive skills (see
   http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/lib/thesis/
   2008/2008boesen.pdf)
   — This may be true for music and various other hobbies as
   well (no conclusive evidence yet)
   — Avoid burnout
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10. Anyone here like working hard
    to only accomplish a
    little?
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11. Avoiding burnout through efficiency
    — Find yourself a trusted system (GTD is one example)
    — Stop managing e-mail and start processing e-mail
    1. If you can do it in less than 2 minutes, do it.
    2. If it takes more than 2 minutes, put it in the trusted system.
    3. If you need the information in the message, archive it.
    4. Otherwise, delete the message.
    — Stop using your inbox as a "to do" system---that's not what it
    is!
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12. Sustaining your skills
    isn't just about technical
    skills, either.
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13. Sustaining skills
    — Non-technical skills are very important in a cloud-centric world
    — The non-technical skills are, in fact, more important than
    technical skills
    — Early 2013 IDC white paper (available from http://
    www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/presskits/learning/
    docs/idc.pdf) lists some important skills sought by hiring
    managers
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14. Important cloud-related job skills
    1. Risk management
    2. IT service management
    3. Project/program management
    4. Business-IT alignment
    5. Technical skills in cloud implementation
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15. Important cloud-related job skills
    1. Risk management
    2. IT service management
    3. Project/program management
    4. Business-IT alignment
    5. Technical skills in cloud implementation
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16. A sidebar on business-IT alignment
    — Talk to the business: Find out the goals of the business,
    and think about how IT can help achieve those goals.
    — Don't use IT jargon: The business doesn't care about
    IOPS, RAM, GHz, TB/PB, SAN, NAS, NFS, or VTEPs. They
    care about meeting their goals.
    — Try to say "Yes": Don't tell the business "No"; instead,
    tell them what it would take to solve their problems.
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18. Important cloud-related job skills
    1. Risk management
    2. IT service management
    3. Project/program management
    4. Business-IT alignment
    5. Technical skills in cloud implementation
    The proof point for this list is the strong adoption
    of...
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19. DevOps
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20. What do these
    skills have to do
    with DevOps?
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21. DevOps isn't just about technology
    — Some of these non-technical skills could be considered part of
    DevOps
    — Consider the "Three Ways of DevOps" (http://itrevolution.com/
    the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/)
    — The First Way: Systems thinking
    — The Second Way: Amplify feedback loops
    — The Third Way: Culture of continuous experimentation and
    learning
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22. Technical skills
    are still important,
    though!
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23. Some technical skills to investigate
    — Automation and orchestration
    — Cloud services
    — Open source
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24. Anyone here being asked to do
    less with more?
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25. The reality is we're
    all being asked to
    do more with less.
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26. This is why
    automation and
    orchestration are
    important: they are
    force multipliers to
    enable you to do
    more with less.
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27. Automation and orchestration examples
    — Configuration management (Ansible, Chef, DSC,
    Puppet, Salt)
    — Cloud orchestration (OpenStack, CloudStack,
    VMware vRealize Automation)
    — Scripting (Bash, Perl, PowerShell, Python, Ruby)
    — APIs (REST, JSON, XML)
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28. Cloud services
    — To become a "broker of cloud services" to the business, you
    must understand how these cloud services work
    — Major providers include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and
    VMware
    — Most (if not all) of these providers have "free tiers" that
    make it easier for you to experiment and learn how they
    work (and what their value is)
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29. Cloud services (continued)
    — Lots of different cloud services to consider:
    — Compute (EC2, Azure, GCE)
    — Storage (Dropbox, Box, S3)
    — SaaS
    — XaaS (DRaaS via vCloud Air, DBaaS, etc.)
    — Each of these may offer value to your organization
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30. Open source
    — Open source is affecting how IT is evolving
    — Linux is increasingly pervasive in all aspects of the data center
    — OpenStack is a leading open source cloud management
    framework
    — Open vSwitch is a key open source networking project
    — Not to mention a whole host of other open source projects, like...
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35. Remember the goal: IT exists to
    support
    the customer
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37. Ambition is the path to
    success. Persistence is the
    vehicle you arrive in.
    — Bill Bradley
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38. Thank you
    Be sure to provide feedback to the VMUG leaders regarding
    this session.
    Blog: http://blog.scottlowe.org
    Twitter: @scott_lowe
    GitHub: https://github.com/lowescott
    Life: Colossians 3:17
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