Cybersecurity is becoming increasingly complex, and it is no secret by now that the number of cyber threats companies face on a daily basis has increased dramatically as a result of the pandemic.
All in all, IT teams and their security experts are pulling extremely long hours to come up with better and more efficient ways of protecting their digital operations and data. As a consequence, that is accelerating digital transformation in the area.
According to IDG, most CIOs consider cybersecurity a top priority, with 65% of companies planning to increase their security budget this year. This increase in demand involves hiring extra staff to tackle cyber threats – a push that will surely accentuate the already severe drought of cybersecurity talent.
But all of this effort
will not translate into long-lasting changes unless organisations institute a
security-aware culture and take a more strategic and proactive approach to cyber
protection. And that must necessarily start from the top.
Accountability
Nobody would be too
surprised if a CEO was ousted after a major financial fiasco. Why would it be
any different with cyber incidents?
A Centrify study from 2019 revealed that almost 40% of UK businesses had dismissed personnel for security-related incidents. You can bet not many of those employees were part of their company’s executive team.
Traditionally, security
breaches have been considered a responsibility of technical teams and IT
leaders, who often end up tracing the incident to a reckless employee who accessed
sensitive information while sipping on a cup of coffee at a local café. Sure, human
error and shadow IT are behind most cyber attacks, but, like with all systemic
problems, a real cultural shift requires everyone’s involvement.
The truth is that technology is too integral to today’s businesses for companies to afford to have leadership that is not directly or at least ultimately responsible for it. Accountability not only ensures better performance; it drives innovation and promotes continuous improvement.
When an executive’s reputation and livelihood are at stake, they are more likely to push for deeper, company-wide initiatives to address potential cyber threats. They will, therefore, invest more resources in protection and become cybersecurity ambassadors within the organisation, setting into motion a series of changes spanning areas from HR to external contractors and business partners.
But to be accountable,
business leaders first need to be knowledgeable.
Executive cybersecurity expertise
Recommending that executives be security-savvy is not to say that CEOs and other members of the board need to have deep technical knowledge of cybersecurity infrastructure and best practices, but they at least must be able to make informed decisions and factor cybersecurity into every key move they make.
One way to achieve such
a boardroom environment is to hire executives with an IT background – a trend
that is quickly gaining traction among the world’s top companies thanks to the
inherent benefits that a strong technical foundation brings to business
processes.
Another is to involve CIOs in the strategic decision-making process. IT leaders have acquired a bigger role since the start of the pandemic, growing closer to CEOs and becoming even more pivotal to business continuity than they were before. Companies should keep moving in this direction.
Newer IT-focused executive positions can also be created. Unfortunately, the figure of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) remains a rather rare occurrence in the c-suite. Although many companies have dedicated IT leaders in charge of cybersecurity, these are often confined to the IT department and do not get enough executive powers and visibility. Elevating CIOs within the organisation would certainly improve cybersecurity.
But not all solutions
involve prioritizing executives with a technical background. Training is always
an option. CEOs and their peers can learn to assess cyber threats and keep their
company’s cyber resilience in mind when making business decisions. CIOs and
their team have a key role to play in this training process, sharing their
experience and actionable insights while delivering periodic security audits to
inform the executive board.
Company culture has been key to business resilience and adaptability during the pandemic and should keep being so in the emerging new reality.
Company culture is deeply rooted in its values. They unite employees and serve as a beacon in a world that is constantly changing. To a company, its values are its DNA, the source code from which to develop. For the individual employee, it is the compass that guides them through the storm. It is the force of conviction that prevents them from stalling in the acceleration phase. But what happens when, amidst a global health crisis, everything is shaken to the core? Will the company’s values be swept away? Or will the company manage to adapt those values to the new context? These questions are fascinating and, above all, crucial.
It probably hasn’t escaped your notice: the younger generations are increasingly sensitive to the values conveyed by their employer. As a result, corporate culture is now a real point of differentiation and a strong lever of attractiveness.
As Peter Drucker, the eminent business management theoretician and consultant, once wrote: culture eats strategy for breakfast. This does not mean that strategy plays a minor role in development and success, but rather that only a strong corporate culture, with strong values, will be able to mobilize and unite all employees to lead them on the road to success. Moreover, there is a difference between what we say and what we do, and we must therefore always ensure that our values and strategy are well aligned. Corporate culture can only exist if company leadership is in line with it and embodies it in their daily actions. One can no longer present oneself as a defender of ecology and form dubious partnerships with polluting companies. The situation has changed.
Companies need now to change their culture in accordance with our evolving society. It is okay to suddenly claim a company value that will be well perceived internally, but it is necessary to apply it in a concrete way. Otherwise, your collaborators will feel neither concerned nor involved.
Values need to be concrete
The values of a company are not abstract. They reflect the company’s activity, its size and its employees. They cover a way of being and acting, behaviours and rites, rules and processes. I firmly believe that a strategy that suddenly deviates from its axis without being based on values is doomed to fail.
In the event of accelerated development, crisis or a pivot, the company’s culture must adapt, but in no way deny itself. To do this, we must start by listening to what our employees have to say. Values, unlike strategy, do not come from the top but from the bottom. They are the foundations, a guarantee of solidity that makes the company’s culture a kind of superior authority. It is thus not uncommon to hear employees refer to it easily, or even with defensiveness, as if invoking culture as an answer to everything: “we do it this way because it is part of our culture”.
And it is not for nothing that the operational efficiency of a company relies heavily on internal communication. It is necessary to constantly remind people of the values we intend to share and to have those who put them into practice every day be vocal about them. This is all the more true in a crisis situation. A value is not just a word that gets thrown around. What matters first and foremost is the way in which each person makes it their own, embodies it and embeds it in their work.
Drawing on values to prepare for the future
A company that goes through a major crisis will always bounce back thanks to the involvement of its employees. Just look at what has happened since the beginning of the pandemic. Company culture has played a determining role in everyone’s ability to adapt. Confronted with an unprecedented situation, people have been able to readjust their values.
Let’s take the example of autonomy. Today, as in the past, the word remains the same, but the reality it covers has totally changed. Until two years ago, being autonomous meant being free to act within one’s own area of competence, without having to refer to one’s manager on a daily basis. With Covid and the rise of teleworking, the notion has broadened. Many people now manage everything themselves: their schedule and their work organization. And everyone will have to learn from this period.
This is the main challenge that awaits companies that want to be ready for the future. How can they evolve their values without disengaging their workforce and, above all, how can they capitalize on their achievements during the health crisis? They will have to go back to the drawing board: question their values, create new working groups, and pay attention to the feelings, experiences and desires of each individual employee.
It has become critical to know the differences between the world before and after the pandemic to identify the right processes and the most efficient action plans. A great and exciting adventure!
This article was originally published on Forbes France.
Cybersecurity engineer Lola Kureno shares cybersecurity career tips and discusses how a single event set her on a completely unexpected professional path.
Lola Kureno is an Israeli-born cybersecurity engineer living in Tokyo and working for IT training and certifications provider INE. An expert pentester and ethical hacking advocate, Lola shares cybersecurity career tips and discusses how a single event changed her life forever and set her on an unexpected professional path.
Interested in more cybersecurity career insights? Discover what makes a state-of-the-art SOC.
You have quite an amazing career story. You set out on a very different path, and then a major event changed everything. What happened?
It’s quite a long story. My background was not in tech at all. Since I was three years old, I was a classical ballerina. That’s what I was set to be my whole life, or so I thought. I was a professional. I was with dancing companies and had all my life centred around classical ballet. That’s all I knew how to do.
And then I had a very bad car accident. I spent six months in the hospital, plus two years of rehabilitation just to get back on my feet. It was really bad. I was a passenger in my coworker’s car. She broke a couple of bones but was okay. But it was a frontal impact for me, and it was not only the physical side of things. It is not good for your mental health to think that all that your life is about can end in a second.
After I was kind of physically recovered, I really didn’t know what to do. That’s why I left the US, where I was living, and went to Europe. I spent about a year not doing anything. I didn’t know what to do with my life.
Later I went to Lisbon and that’s where I met my husband and got married. We moved to Tokyo, and life here was very different from anything that I was used to. And eventually, I had to get a job, but I didn’t know how to do anything else besides ballet.
So, I got a normal job in a company, like 8 to 5, but I wasn’t happy. It paid, but it wasn’t anything that let me be ambitious, be competitive, learn and study. It was boring. Get back from work and watch TV, go to sleep and repeat. The same routine. It didn’t make me happy.
And then you found tech. Why did you go into IT and pursue a career in cybersecurity?
Computers were always a hobby for me. My father was an engineer, and I got my first computer when I was really young. But it was just something I did when I had time.
And I shared with my husband that I was feeling like I was a waste, that I wasn’t doing anything. And he said “well, you shouldn’t. You’re smart just do something with the computer. You like computers.”
But, you know, I had that image, that thought that if I didn’t have a degree in engineering or computer science or something related, I couldn’t do anything. And I was in my early 30s, I was not a kid anymore.
I didn’t know what to do, so I started researching about maybe getting a first degree, something like that that I could do. And I came across something along the lines that you could actually hack for a living. And I was like really, hack for a living? That was very intriguing to me. I was very curious about it. So, I started researching and that’s when I learned about cybersecurity and something got into me. I started researching more career options and that’s how it started.
So, how did you actually get started in your cybersecurity career?
After discovering all of this, I couldn’t think of anything else but that. I still had my full-time job, but I would come back from work and be back on the computer. I did that on the weekends.
And, talking to people, I met someone who was studying for the eLearnSecurity Junior Penetration Tester (eJPT) certification. And he said, well, there is this platform where you study and, when you feel ready, you just buy the test, take it and can get certified. I had read about some other certifications, but I didn’t feel qualified to take any of them. I was just starting, you know.
So, I would study every day using materials from the cyber mentor Heath Adams. He was my first big source of information. And then I started looking at cyber security content from Neal Bridges. That was another community that really gave me lots of information. From there, I met many amazing professionals like Phillip Wylie, an amazing pentester who now is a personal friend of mine besides being a colleague in the industry.
And yeah, that’s how it started. I eventually took the eJPT test and passed it. Later, I got an internship, being an intern for Neal Bridges’ personal consulting company. I spent some months being his intern and learned a lot of things.
I was learning continuously. It was an everyday thing. I didn’t do anything else, just study. And then the opportunity to work at INE was presented to me, and I took it.
What does your current position as a cybersecurity engineer involve?
Actually, penetration testing is just a small portion of my current job tasks. I do much more than that. I would say that penetration test is maybe like 15% of it all, 20% perhaps.
Lots of what I do involves talking not only to coworkers but talking to clients. If you don’t know how to talk to people, you’re behind. So, you need to have those soft skills.
Are programming skills a must for a successful cybersecurity career?
You don’t need to be a developer, you don’t need to be a coder. But it helps to at least to understand what’s going on in a piece of code. You use Bash, PowerShell, Python, Go, Ruby. Those are some of the languages that we are always using.
You don’t need to know how to use these languages at a development level, but knowing what’s going on helps. If you come from a development background, it helps. Absolutely, very helpful.
What skills would you recommend others to focus on to advance their cybersecurity career?
would say that it’s wonderful that you’re focusing on all your hacking and pentesting skills, but know that you need some other skills to go with that.
Right now, a big part of my routine is learning cloud. My job is a lot in the cloud. Of course, I’m still studying pentesting, but I am studying cloud because I need it for my job. I know the fundamentals, but I still feel that’s not enough, and cloud it’s now a crucial skill for the whole cybersecurity world. It doesn’t matter what your job is in cyber: you need to know some cloud.
What other advice would you give to people pursuing a cybersecurity career?
There is always room for improvement. It doesn’t matter if you are someone who’s one year into the industry or 10 or 20. There is always something new to learn. It doesn’t stop.
Talk to people. Don’t hide behind your computer screen. Network.
Also, make sure to have an active LinkedIn profile. Many people think that LinkedIn is only for job hunting, so after they finally find a job, they let their LinkedIn profile die, and that’s a big mistake.
The fact that you already have a job doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be open to opportunities. There are always things to do, not only your full-time job. So, keep networking, keep talking to people.
Go to conferences. If you can’t go to a conference, volunteer for them. Volunteering for conferences gives you the opportunity to be in contact with wonderful people. Brush your soft skills.
And if you’re not in the industry yet, if you’re still hoping to get your first cyber job, finding a mentor is a good idea. Plenty of people would be very happy to help you out. Don’t be afraid of connecting to people.
Lastly, don’t give up. Many times, when I was job hunting, I came very close to giving up. But, since I had networked so much, I had so many people who knew that I was job hunting. And they didn’t let me give up. That’s another benefit of networking. These people have your got back, they keep you accountable, they keep you on track. So, don’t give up.
It’s hard. You will get many noes for silly reasons. You will get 10, maybe 15 or 100 noes. But you will get that yes.
For more tips about pentesting and cybersecurity careers, make sure to follow Lola on Twitter and LinkedIn.
With AI evolving so rapidly, it can be hard to keep up with new developments. This list of top AI experts in the UK will help you stay in the know.
With artificial intelligence evolving so rapidly, it can be hard to keep up with new developments, best practices and the industry’s overall state of the art. For this reason, we at Mindquest suggest you this list of top AI experts in the UK that will help you stay in the know and future-proof your career in AI.
Need to start a new permanent or freelance assignment? Join Mindquest and get access to our job offers.
Top AI experts in the UK to follow
As the IT environment is constantly evolving, it is crucial, if not necessary, to connect with the brightest minds to keep up with innovation. In other words, the more contacts you get, the more likely you are to solve IT challenges. Therefore, we at Mindquest to provide you with a list of the AI experts in the uk to follow.
To continue, Rob is the director of AI at PwC UK and a champion for the responsible use of technology and AI. He is also an advisor for the IEEE and the UK’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI and a TEDx speaker.
Then, Sarah is the founder and CEO of InspiredMinds, a global community and strategy group focusing on the use and development of AI for good in line with the UN’s sustainable development goals.
Let’s go on with Yarin, an Associate Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford’s Applied and Theoretical Machine Learning Group, helping produce groundbreaking work like this set of Bayesian Deep Learning benchmarks.
Elena, on the other hand, is the founder and CEO of Teens in Ai, a global initiative launched at the UN’s 2018 AI for Good Global Summit and that seeks to inspire the next generations of ethical AI researchers and practitioners.
Danilo, then, is a Senior Staff Researcher and lead of the Generative Models and Inference group at DeepMind, London. His research focuses on scalable inference and generative models for decision-making and hard science problems.
In this post, we discuss AI in the workplace with our Chief Digital Officer, Felix Lemaignent.
Next, recently MP for Stoke-on-Trent South at UK Parliament, a lecturer and data science apprenticeships program director at Keele University, Dr Allison Gardner is co-founder of Women Leading in AI, which brings together AI and business leaders to discuss the future of AI.
Then there is Wendy Hall, a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE) and a champion for UK AI skills and women in science. She is Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute and joined the BT Technology Advisory board earlier this year.
Last but but not least, Ankur is a Robotics Research Scientist at NVIDIA AI and a Research Scientist at OpenAI working at the intersection of computer vision and control for robotics. He did a post-doc at Cambridge University and has a PhD from Imperial College London.
Do you have any other AI experts in the UK who should be featured in this or future lists? Shoot us anemail.
Jake Furlong, Technical Lab Developer at AWS tells us about his DevOps career and how we went from US Marine to becoming an all-around DevOps specialist.
From US Marines to AWS, a DevOps Career. Jake Furlong is a Technical Lab Developer at Amazon Web Services (AWS) and a self-taught DevOps expert, Site Reliability Engineer and cloud architect. He tells us how he went from being in the US Marine Corps to DevOps Career and to becoming an all-around DevOps specialist. And shares DevOps career tips and insights.
You spent several years with the US Marines and your educational background is in business. How did you transition into tech and devops career?
I got out of the US Marine Corps and, honestly, I just took the first job that I could find. I started training new employees on how to use an Avaya telecom system; which I myself had no idea what that was. I did that for a few months and then they moved me into another role; as director of admissions systems and analytics. I had access to some free courses. So I took calculus and some computer architecture classes because that was kind of was interested in.
Then I stumbled across a CompTIA certification road map online and picked up an A+ book. I started reading through that and I stumbled across a book called Automate The Boring Stuffand started learning some Python. And most of my job was done through CRM and a lot of Excel, a lot of functions. I just started converting it to Python to automate my job and then I automated my friends’ jobs. And before you know it, it was all just running Python.
And I was talking about it while playing World of Warcraft, of all things. I had a friend in my WoW guild who worked for an SAP company and said “hey, we’re hiring if you want to switch into tech”. I talked to my family about doing a complete and total career switch.
The interview went horrible, but they were very very nice. I was willing to learn and they had seen how much I had learned in such a short time at my previous job and gave me a chance. I got an offer and that was the beginning.
You have quite a portfolio of certifications. Is that how you learned the most?
As I said, I read through that A+ book, but mostly for the knowledge. Based on what I wanted to do in IT, I didn’t really want a hardware-related certification. Because I think that, for hiring managers, sometimes it’s easy to misconstrue a person’s skills based on what certifications they have. So I wanted to make sure I was marketing myself in a way I thought was relevant for the things that I wanted to do.
That’s when I found AWS and I kind of looked at the state of IT at the time and figured that cloud was really the way forward. I got AWS certified and then my company was getting really hands-on with GCP. So I got GCP certified and all of that was through free online courses and a paid Linux Academy subscription. I thought about getting an IT degree but it was just too expensive and there wasn’t enough hands-on. It was mostly theory. So I kind of took the theory from the books that I had, and then once I found Linux Academy, I just did every course.
Anything operating systems, Windows, Linux, database programming, web stuff, web development, cloud — whatever I could find. Then I found a site called Open Source Society University, and they have a GitHub page that basically gives you a list of courses from edX, Coursera or other free online tools that teach you the equivalent of a computer science degree.
That was very, very helpful. Then I just took that information and volunteered for every project at work. I took any ticket and tried to automate it, stuff like that. And the whole time, I was told that certs aren’t important to all the people that I worked with. But I think that hiring managers and HR might disagree. And let’s be honest, it’s kind of hard to get jobs without proving you have the knowledge and.
Since I don’t have a degree in anything technology related, I felt I needed to kind of differentiate myself a little bit. So I got those to kind of compensate for not having a degree.
What’s your opinion on free courses vs bootcamps or official certifications?
I always go with free stuff or at least like the inexpensive Udemy sales. I think bootcamps are great for entry-level, but they don’t really allow you to work past that and most of the content online will get you through the basics. Try to solve a problem or find a problem to solve and really get your hands dirty with development or cloud engineering.
Certs are fine if you need them for a specific position or career goal. But I wouldn’t do one to learn. I might take the study guide and use that, but I think certs are a huge market and there’s a lot of money to be made from people that are looking to get certified.
I honestly just went to a lot of meetups. And I pretty much changed my podcasts to tech podcasts and just listened to those all the time.
I also focused on vendor documentation as opposed to online learning. Whether that’s the Kubernetes administrator guides or AWS or GCP documentation. Because you’re getting it straight from the horse’s mouth, and, as a musician (I studied jazz) we always go back to who was the original musician and study their technique and their ideas. So I kind of took the same approach to tech. Where did JavaScript come from? Where did Python come from? And try to study the root of where that came from.
How was the experience of being with the Marines. What’s your biggest takeaway from your time with them?
I had a great time in the Marine corps. Believe it or not, I thought it was a lot of fun.
My biggest takeaway was really about how to work on a team. As much as there’s a lot of technical things I learned and things like that.
There’s just something about being humble and being a life-long learner and always striving to be better. About knowing your weaknesses and seeking self-improvement and being self-reliant and self-disciplined.
In tech, you have to because nobody is going to force you to hone your skills or learn a new programming language or how to administer Docker containers. You know, just that whole self-reliant aspect of being a continuous learner.
You design and implement technical labs, which are training programs for AWS customers. What does that involve?
I work on the training and curriculum team, and we deliver content to our AWS customers. We have an awesome team.
I work with them to help build and design labs and lab instructions. So, if you were to go to AWS, and want to take a course to learn how to be an architect, for example, we have designers and curriculum developers, architects, managers and product managers that we worked together with to formulate a plan to build a course.
And my job day-to-day is to go through and support them so that, when they get to the hands-on portion, that a student can click start lab and that everything underneath the hood is provisioned and ready, works every time, and is repeatable across multiple devices or operating systems. I also ensure that the lab instructions are clear and easy to understand, from people who may have a lot of experience to people for whom this is their first time working with the cloud.
So it’s a technical role, but there’s a lot of human aspect to it. Understanding how people learn and how people learn technology – as a person who is basically self-taught, I use that a lot in this role.
First in DevOps career, now DataOps. The DevOps philosophy seems to be permeating all areas of IT. What do you think is the success behind this way of thinking? What will be the next “Ops”?
I will start by saying that I don’t think DevOps is a real thing. As a community, we can’t even agree on what it is. We’ve been doing this since the 70s, the 80s? Really since the 60s. With Deming, and all of the work he did toward continuous improvement, total quality management, things like that.
And I think what we’re going to see is that we’ll revisit value stream mapping. How can we best automate and streamline value stream maps. Right now, we’re automating everything, and it’s all about pipelines and getting the developers close.
I think that’ll be short lived. We should have always been doing that, and I think connecting development to automation and ops problems is good. I think DevOps, the core of it, we want the developer problems and ops problems to kind of be the same problems, right? Where ops informs development workflows.
Developers use that workflow to produce either new tools or better tools, or even more consistent infrastructure. But sometimes ops doesn’t want things to change. And, as somebody who’s worked in the ops world, I totally respect that and I completely understand. As somebody who’s worked on the devish side of DevOps, I understand needing to get new versions of things out and upgrading things and patching things so that there’s a balance between it.
But I think what we’re really going to see is that, as you get to DataOps and really anything that needs to inform ops, is that everything is going to be data-driven. But it’s going to have to be value streamed.
So, what is the most important? What do you get the most benefit from as far as value? How much money are we really making or saving by approving X project or making Y operations a department priority?
I think, eventually, and once you start finding an efficient way and accurate way to attach dollars or time to these things, you may have some time and value attached to them as it pertains to the business and not just how many commits you made last month or something
DevOps career: What’s the day-to-day of a DevOps team like
A lot of it is requests for automation, declarative infrastructure, tons of monitoring, moving into containerization or modernizing orchestration tools, stuff like that.
I think a lot of it is also developer advocacy and just DevOps evangelism. Because it’s been around for a while, but it’s still relatively new. It hasn’t really permeated all the cultures yet. So, while a lot of people have a DevOps team, the cultural side I think needs a lot of work. So a lot of time is spent explaining why we’re doing this.
It sounds like the value is obvious, but it still takes up a lot of time to describe why we need resources, why we need time, why we should be doing certain projects.
A lot of the time is spent researching new tech, building up labs on your workstation or in the cloud somewhere, and testing a deployment meeting with ops teams to discuss their pain points.
And then, of course, all the pipeline things, so it’s a very collaborative job. You’re not going to see a DevOps person in a silo.
On a given day, you never know what you’re going to do. But it’s always going to be automating something or fixing something or updating something or monitoring something, justifying what it is that you’re doing.
What’s the best career advice you have ever been given?
Ironically, it actually came from a conductor of a music organization. He said “find something you love and do that because, no matter what you do or where you go, you’ll always be doing something that you enjoy.
Just do what you know is right and provide value to everyone around you and don’t worry too much about certifications. If you have the knowledge, it will all come together.
Just always be learning.
For more tips about DevOps career, make sure to follow Jake on LinkedIn.
John Micale, Customer Experience Account Manager at oXya, shares tips for efficient SAP project management SAP career advancement.
SAP project management expert John Micale is Customer Experience Account Manager at oXya, a Hitachi Group company delivering leading SAP run management, consulting and cloud hosting services.
John is tasked with ensuring that a consistent, high-quality service is provided to all of the company’s customers, overseeing client relationships, project management and business development.
He tells us about his career beginnings and shares tips for efficient SAP project management and career advancement.
Interested in SAP careers and SAP project management? You might also enjoy this interview about another possible career path for an SAP consultant.
How did you get started in tech? How did you start working at oXya?
I’ve been using computers, playing video games and using technology since I was a kid. When it was time to choose a university, I decided to pick one that specialized in engineering and technology. I earned my degree in computer engineering, and that kind of led me on to this track of IT and how I wound up at oXya. And it’s kind of a funny story.
When I was in school, I was looking for a job in my last year. I was doing interviews and did an interview with oXya. I had no idea who they were or what SAP and Basis were, but they were really compelling, and they said that they could teach me.
I actually got a job offer from them. But I still had one semester of schooling left, so I couldn’t take the job. But they said “try again in the springtime. And so, I applied for the job again in the spring and they hired me. I really appreciated that opportunity from them.
What are the advantages of working at a specialist consultancy or service management company like oXya, as opposed to working in-house for a sole company?
Number one is definitely diversity in experiences. So, having the exposure to different industries, different customers using different products. You gain a lifetime’s worth or even multiple lifetimes worth of experience and background in just a few years. And I think that was incredible for me and for many of my colleagues working at oXya.
Number two is diversity in projects and technologies. So, touching every kind of operating system and version, every kind of database product, every kind of SAP product. Many companies say “OK, I’m going to use ECC, or I’m going to use Linux.” And that’s it. That’s the decision they made and maybe, every 10 years, they change products and you’re stuck with the same thing. Having that diversity keeps you sharp.
Another thing is that clients who typically use SAP are large and very corporate customers. And, if you are working with them, you’re automatically included in a very corporate environment. Being part of a smaller company like oXya, we have more of a startup-like vibe. So you kind of get the best of both worlds. You get smaller teams and a tighter community, and you move more rapidly, but you can still support this product, SAP, which is this huge corporate tool.
What about the challenges?
The learning curve is really steep. For example, I didn’t know what SAP was, or I didn’t have a lot of strength in database technologies, and to take all of that in at once is quite a lot. If you stick with it, you can catch up at some point, but the learning curve is really steep.
And the projects don’t ever end. That can be a good thing too, that can be in the good category. It depends on what kind of personality you have, but there’s no respite. You are working for a big corp, and they have this upgrade project that lasts two years. And then that’s it for them for a while, whereas, on our side, we’re doing a new project every three months, and it hasn’t stopped in 10 years for me.
After two years in a technical position, you transitioned into a more managerial role. What advice would you give to other specialists looking to take that step?
Being a manager is a job. It’s not just an extra task that you have to do. It took me a long time to realize that, and I see that mistake happen often with new managers. To do it correctly, you have to prioritize that role. It’s not just about having to approve someone’s time off or something like that. The investment in training and people is a full job. If you’re mixing this job as a manager with your technical job, for example, that’s often a recipe for disaster where you choose one priority over another and one of those two will suffer.
Internal company relationships are really important too. That’s an important part of being a manager. It’s not about being a brown-noser or saying nice things to your boss. But management roles are based on trust and execution. There’s not a binary output most of the time, so you have to be a reliable person, and you have to make sure that you are sharing your reliability and your credibility with your managers and with your team.
What are the keys to effective SAP project management?
Understanding the project. I think that’s like the number one. It sounds like a silly thing to say, but I think often folks come in and they say “OK, here’s a project and I’m going to follow a checklist.” But you have to really understand why. Why are we doing this project? What is the real purpose?
Normally there’s a CIO or CFO at some company who has to make some decision, and that trickles down eventually to many projects. And, if you’re not aware of the big picture, then you might not really understand what kind of impact you’re trying to make. So first, you really need to understand the project.
Secondly, coordination in SAP project management is incredibly important, the synergy. And not just internally with your teams and your company, but with your customers or with their third parties. Every customer now has 5-10 vendors, and there’s an expectation that vendors can work together, that there can be synergies and there is not a weak link.
Also, keeping commitments is really important for project management. Everything is essentially a stack of dominoes. If you miss a target, that’s going to affect the whole project. And that doesn’t build trust and or credibility. So, if you’re making commitments, they have to be realistic and you have to keep those commitments. Everything else falls right into place once you meet that.
The deadline to migrate to S/4HANA is rapidly approaching. What do you see as the biggest challenges for a smooth transition?
It all starts with a kind of a legacy mindset. Most customers that are on ECC today say “it’s been working this way for 10 years, 15,20 years. Why do we need to change it?” They say “they will move the goalposts again. Why do we need to make this transformation?”
But the web of external interfaces that connect to ECC makes any concept of transformation really challenging for most customers, especially these really legacy customers. S/4HANA is designed to solve that problem. It’s designed to eliminate the complexity, simplify the code base, simplify the connectivity to it, and kind of futureproof SAP customers from that kind of problem in the future. But making that transformation is still really painful and usually very expensive.
I think the value proposition is really what isn’t obvious for most customers. If you can communicate the future state of the company, not what it will look like in one year or two years after some migration or upgrade, but what it’s going to look like in 5, 10, 15 years; if you can make them see how S/4HANA or cloud-based tools can reimagine their supply chain or things like that, I think that’s when they have the a-ha moment.
It’s not about taking your car and just changing the tires. It’s about turning it electric. It’s a total redesign of the whole concept.
What’s the best career advice you have ever been given?
I would say I had two great career advices. One was to stay humble and have humility with your peers, have humility with your customers. If you’re scoring all the time, it feels good to think that you’re a champ and everything goes right. But then you’re exposing yourself to vulnerabilities or blind spots. So, stay humble. Wins are wins, which is great, but sometimes you need to have an open perspective.
And the second best advice I have been given is: be a buoy. What do I mean by that? Like a buoy in the ocean. Sometimes you want to just be like a Godzilla and knock stuff around and shake things up, especially when things aren’t going well. But, almost all the time, people are looking for stability. They’re looking for reliability, accountability. And, I’ve realized over the years that people will flock to you naturally if you’re stable, if you’re consistent. So be a buoy like in the ocean.
Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?
I want to help radically change what customers experience from SAP outsourcing. That’s like a super bold claim, but I think that outsourcing as a concept has always had a bad rep. And I think that a partner can be more empathetic, less transactional. We can be an equal in their organization and be a real partner.
And I’m seeing with my customers that, when they’re treated this way, we get a different experience. They treat us like people, they treat us like partners. They even have more flexibility with us, which says a lot. They don’t have to give us any kind of flexibility, but they do it.
So, I would really like to make that kind of change, and I really want to help train others in this kind of methodology.I want our industry to be more empathetic and more partner-focused. In the real sense. Not in the corny corporate sense, but in a real in a real sense. To really make a difference. Because, otherwise, what are we doing?
For more tips on SAP project management, careers and consulting, make sure to follow John on LinkedIn.
You can also explore our S/4HANA careers guide for a comprehensive overview of how to embark on this promising career journey.
My name is Thomas Mercier, and, almost a year ago, I began a reskilling journey to become a web integrator and web designer.
My name is Thomas Mercier, alias “TomCodeur” on Youtube, and I am 24 years old. Almost a year ago, I began a reskilling journey to become a web integrator/web designer.
We are at the end of October. It is a little after 4 p.m., and I am in the office of my employer’s accountant in order to finally sign the termination of my contract.
I say “finally” because this transitional moment had been hard to accomplish. To undergo this reskilling, I had to find a way to finance my training.
My plan was simple: call on Fongecif, an organization accessible to employees wishing to retrain without having to terminate their employment contract.
Rather attractive, isn’t it?
Yes, except that I never managed to benefit from it. And I wasted over a year trying to put together cases that were all turned down.
So, I decided to change my plan and discuss it with my employer. Luckily, my boss was understanding and offered me a mutually agreed departure. The advantage? It provides access to aid for getting back to work, which includes financing for training.
Well, there was still an important step left:
Convincing the French governmental employment agency Pôle emploi of the seriousness of my reskilling project and show that this decision was not taken on a whim.
I told you that I wasted a year before starting my training. In reality, it was not completely the case: during this year, I took the time to inform myself and I discovered multiple web development training courses within the Haut-de-France region.
This research greatly helped me when I had to demonstrate to my government unemployment advisor that I was highly motivated and determined to carry out this project.
During this “lost” year, I also completed a few self-taught development projects. They were greatly appreciated by my advisor and it really made a difference.
My effort and serious commitment paid off in the end. My financing request has been accepted.
So, here I am in the accountant’s office. All the documents have been signed, the withdrawal period has passed and my month’s notice is over. I am finally leaving my company and my current position, on the way to developer training!
Want to know what happened next?
In the three months after I graduated from Pop School, a 6-month boot camp to become a Web & Mobile Web Developer, I had five interviews. Out of those five interviews, I received two offers. This proves that there is work for the reskilled profiles.
So, what do I take away from this whole story? Reskilling cannot be done overnight. It takes a long time, a time in which we doubt and we are afraid of failure. But it is all well worth the effort.
You just have to believe in it and don’t let go!
If I had to give four tips to someone who, like me, to completely change their career and start working as a developer, I would say:
1. Prepare to learn: your brain will be your best friend in this new adventure. So help it receive all the information you are going to feed it.
2. Set up a routine that suits your lifestyle.
3. Eliminate all distractions: organisational tools and lo-fi music … give yourself every chance to stay focused and be productive.
4. Test your future job: you must ask yourself if it is possible … but know that there are different ways to do it and that this initiative will teach you a lot about your future job.
The final word? Stay motivated and don’t give up!
For more advice on how to get started in your web developer career or transition into development, make sure to follow Thomas on YouTube and through his website.
Rune of Learn Python With Rune tells us about his career story and how one should go about mastering this powerful programming language.
Rune holds a PhD in Computer Science and works as a freelance Python consultant specialising in big data and back-end development. When the pandemic hit, he kickstarted the learning platformLearn Python With Rune to teach others how to learn Python and apply it. He tells us about his career story & how to learn Python, how one should go about mastering this powerful programming language.
How did you go from doing a PhD to working in tech?
Back in the days when I started university, I actually didn’t think of doing a PhD in the first place. I was just starting but I thought learning is awesome, so I immediately decided I wanted to get a PhD.
But while I was studying for my PhD, I realised it wasn’t really for me because it wasn’t really deeply about science. It’s more about publishing papers and getting funding to continue your career.
So after I finished my PhD, I started as a developer mainly in the security area (I’ve been working a lot in the security business.) I realised that the one thing that I liked was getting things done, getting projects done. So, I slowly became also a manager type person and worked a few years as a manager. Then I continued working in a SaaS company as an engineering manager for architecture and back-end teams and stuff like that.
But then you went back to development. How is that? When did you decide to kickstart Learn Python With Rune?
I realised I missed programming a lot, and that’s actually where my journey with Learn Python With Rune started.
I wanted to learn programming again. As a manager, you slowly lose touch with programming because you’re not really doing any professional code anymore. And I kind of missed that.
So, a bit more than a year ago, I got the idea. It was actually when the coronavirus pandemic started. I had more time and was working from home, and I was like “I want to program again.” So, I started this small project. I started producing small projects, publishing them on a web page, and one thing led to another. And it just escalated.
Now, I work as a freelance consultant and they hire me and I do programming again in a freelance manner. And the reason I like that is because you kind of get more freedom. So, if you want to have some vacation, you just do it. It’s more freedom.
Why Python? What makes Python so great?
I had to start somewhere, right? I hadn’t been programming that much in Python professionally, but I’ had been programming in C a lot. C is a really low-level programming language and it’s very effective, but you can make so many errors, pointers and stuff like that. It’s just a pain when you don’t know much because you can just do what a processor can do.
But Python is abstracted away. And what happened with Python over the last maybe 10 years is that it has so many libraries. So you can do everything efficiently. It has been developed a lot, for instance, in data science and big data and stuff like that (I myself work with Python in the big data and back-end side of things.) And you can do all this processing now because you have the libraries that can do all the heavy work, but you just manage it in Python code so it can get beautiful.
It’s easy to understand, It’s readable. It’s almost super code. That’s the main reason I love Python. But there are also some things that I’m not so fond of.
Like what? What is Python not so great at?
It does hide some of the things away, some of the objects and how they are represented. When you are programming in C you know everything exactly on a byte level. In Python, it’s kind of hidden away.
And I see a lot of beginners having a hard time and struggling with what an object is and what object-oriented programming is, for instance. Because we say that, in Python, everything is an object, but really, is it?. I don’t know. It depends on the implementation. And then they confuse object-oriented programming on top of that.
So, I think it does a really good job, but there are some areas that are not easy to understand in Python. But the pain you get from that is way less than the efficiency and productivity you can get from writing code in Python.
How should one learn Python? What are your main pieces of advice?
Nowadays it’s difficult to start actually, in some sense, because there’s so much information out there. So my first advice is to ask yourself: what is it that you want to achieve with Python? What is it that you want to learn? What is it you want to code?
If you just start thinking “I want to program in Python,” then you start a little bit here, a little bit there. All the information is available. The problem is that it’s unstructured. So you get excited about this little bit here, and then you do that, but they are different types of using Python.
If you want to program back-end like I’m doing, then that is one kind of doing. If you just want to do data science, that’s a different way. You don’t really need to master programming that well, you just need to use some libraries and understand a little about math and so on.
So it really depends on what you want to achieve. I think people often go around too much. So, advice number one is figure out what it is that you want with it.
Then find one teacher, one style. It’s just easier. If you take a little bit of this tutorial on the Internet, then a different tutorial, people can do things very differently and it can be difficult to have a cohesive approach.
The third issue is about managing your expectations about how fast it is to learn. When you learn a new language, you can listen to it and understand it. But when you have to express yourself, it’s different. It’s difficult. You don’t know how to say things, but you understand it. And it’s the same with programming.
Suddenly, when you see the solution, how people solved it, you go “yeah, I understand it all and that makes total sense.” But when you have to write it, you might have no idea how to solve problems. And that’s kind of the same problem you have right when you start. You understand Python, but you cannot express yourself in it.
So, I think that would be my three main pieces of advice for beginners.
One: figure out what you want to do. Two: find one tutor or one style of programming, one book. Three: manage your expectations. It takes a bit more time to learn to write Python than to read it.
What’s the difference between a senior Python developer and a junior one?
There are actually some aspects I think people overlook.
One of them is that, when you have a junior in a work environment, you need to help them. If you take somebody straight out of college, for instance, there are a lot of things they don’t teach in college. You know, how to do metrics, monitoring, how to ensure everything is healthy in your system. They don’t teach them that, so that’s one thing they’re lacking. It’s the experience.
Another thing that juniors tend to do is focus on building small systems. Most college-educated and self-taught people tend to do small projects because they’re easier and you have greater chances of success.
But there is an enormous difference between having one tiny system with one tiny server and a distributed system with tens and sometimes hundreds of systems that need to interact with each other and you need to figure out what to do.
What happens when you make changes to this small thing here? How do you rebuild it when it breaks? How do you build systems that scales in features and amount of users and volume of data?
Juniors usually can solve small-scale problems, whereas a senior developer can handle bigger scale problems.
Another aspect I noticed over the years is that juniors are often a bit afraid. When starting in a team, when starting to develop, a junior will not be so quick to contribute to it and will want people to check the code more often and to help them more, because they are a bit afraid.
So, when things go wrong, they don’t really have the confidence to just do stuff. and break stuff and put it back up again. They like that kind of experience and confidence.
My advice for new people is to build something bigger. Build something with somebody else.
You might have done tiny projects in college, or you may have worked together with other people for a bit. But try to make something bigger because you need to be able to build interfaces that interact with each other., where somebody builds one piece and somebody else builds another piece. That will teach you the kind of architecture design principles behind all of it.
I still think that’s a less important part today because there’s a tendency to go to all these microservices or services that are small in framework. And that makes them easier to understand, easier to debug, easier to maintain by other people.
So it’s not as difficult as back in the day when you had this one big monolith that was running everything. Right now, you have small services that are easier to understand, but it also moves the problem somewhere else. How do you find where the problem is when the system goes down? You need to have really really good monitoring to find things nowadays.
So you actually move some of the complexity over to the infrastructure guys or the SREs (Site Reliability Engineers). That’s why they are paid a higher rate now than they used to be. A good SRE is so valuable when you need to find problems in big systems.
For more tips on how to master Python, make sure to follow Rune on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook.
He’s working on a new course portfolio focusing on how to use Python for financial analysis, so stay tuned!
My name is Nolwenn Nasri, and I am a freelance UX / UI designer. In 2020 I completely questioned my freelance activity. Here's my unfiltered experience.
My name is Nolwenn Nasri, and I am a freelance UX / UI designer, as well as the founder of Freelances Travel, a small company whichdedicates to the organisation of coworking stays with other freelancers. In 2020 I completely questioned my freelance activity. Here’s my unfiltered experience.
Ah, 2020… a year that was very unique for all of us.
But I think it might have been especially special for me because in 2020, I became a mother.
Becoming a mother is wonderful. But it’s also a huge upheaval. My daily life was completely turned upside down, and I launched into an intense introspection of various aspects of my life; with the desire to do things differently.
This introspection focused in particular on my activity as a freelance UX / UI designer.
Let me give you a bit of background: I have been freelancing for 5 years, and my activity as a freelance UX / UI designer has been going well for some time. The projects followed one after another, I didn’t have too many problems getting new assignments, the clients were satisfied. In short, everything was going well.
But I was no longer sure where I was going, how to choose my assignments, how to guide the development of my activity. How should I manage my time? I was satisfied with my income but I felt an urge to do more and more, I constantly felt guilty about not working “enough.”
In short, I was a little lost.
Agreed that this is a “rich man’s problem.” A lot of freelancers struggle to find assignments. But it still caused me a lot of frustration.
So I decided to hire a leadership coach.
It was a big decision because it was quite an expense. But I felt I needed it. And it turned out to be an investment that paid off.
What did the coaching sessions consist of?
I imagine you are about to say: “but Nolwenn, what has this to do with your freelance activity?”
These exercises had the aim to take me out of my comfort zone. To make me gain confidence in myself. To make me make decisions and take responsibility for my choices.
I realised that I had two alternatives:
either maximize my working time and grow my business as much as possible to generate more income, or
set a target income to achieve and devote a minimum of time to it, enjoying all my remaining time to develop my sides projects and take care of my daughter
I chose the 2nd option.
After 5 years as a freelancer, my goal is not to earn more, but rather to reduce my working time.
This decision was a big step for me.
But it was still necessary to take concrete measures to move towards this goal. For me, this was done in 3 main steps:
1. Define my priorities for my freelance activity
Today, I consider that I wear two hats: on the one hand, my activity as a UX / UI designer, which allows me to generate the bulk of my income, and on the other hand my Freelances Travel project, which I approach more like a playground.
Whatever the project, I realised that what interested me the most was to forge rich relationships with people, to bring value, to share my knowledge, and to create strong connections.
This is the reason why I decided, in addition to keeping my two hats, to save time to cultivate these connections by either interacting with members of my network on LinkedIn, or by creating content for my Youtube channel.
2. Define concrete objectives in terms of income and working hours
I used a very simple calculation: my ADR (average daily rate) is currently 500 euros; my monthly turnover target is 4000 euros excluding tax per month (no need to specify that, but after charges and taxes, I have about half left net).
4000 divided by 500 equals 8.
Conclusion: I no longer seek to increase my customer volume, on the contrary. I’m just looking to “staff myself” over 8 full days, on assignments that interest me.
I have adopted a fairly compartmentalised weekly organization. Tuesday and Thursday are my “production” days. I’m off every Friday to take care of my daughter. And, the rest of the time, I take care of Freelances Travel, my Youtube channel, and I chat with members of my network. Without forgetting of course to keep me a little time to manage my accounting and prospecting.
I also learned to detach myself from the eyes of others. Many people around me do not understand why I do not seize all the mission opportunities that present themselves to me. Why am I not looking to generate more income? But it’s my choice and I accept it!
And you, how do you see your freelance life? What is your definition of a successful career as a tech & IT freelancer? Where do you draw the line between income and working time?
Sarah Lean (Techielass), Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, discusses getting into community relations and shares tips for a successful data centre migration.
Sarah Lean, aka Techielass, is a Scotland-based IT infrastructure, ops, and sys admin expert and Azure community evangelist. The founder of the Glasgow Azure User Group, Sarah works as a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft and blogs, tweets and has her own YouTube channel. She discusses, cloud careers, how you can get into community relations. What makes a successful data centre migration, and how Data Centre Migration is about technology and people.
I started off in a Sys Admin role, so I was a helpdesk engineer doing morning password resets for everybody, fishing out bits of broken paper from their printers, and stuff like that. I worked my career through those various different roles. In the UK, we call helpdesk roles first-level roles and then second-level is the support engineers that go out to people’s desks. Third-level is when you get to design systems for customers.
So, I basically went through those support levels within my career and just built up lots of experience both internally and externally. I was in companies where they just had a small IT department and they didn’t understand what IT departments did and how crucial they were. And then I also worked for managed service providers, dedicating myself to various different customers, etc.
How did you eventually become a Microsoft cloud advocate and a prominent figure in the Azure community?
I kind of fell into the community role because I wanted to learn Azure and there were no user groups in Scotland. I think the closest user group to me at the time was in London. Which is obviously not something you want to do it you finish working on Wednesday night; go down to London to user group and then come back up to your work the next day. It’s obviously not logistically feasible, so I basically started the Glasgow Azure user group to fulfil my need. Basically, to learn Azure and find out where everybody else was fitting this into the on-prem and cloud worlds.
And yeah, I kind of fell into running the user group and then started speaking at events. People were like “you need to speak at events and share your story and journey”. Which I didn’t want to do. But then I fell into it and; before I knew it; I was getting headhunted to become a cloud advocate at Microsoft.
It definitely hasn’t been a planned evolution in my career, if I’m going to be brutally honest about it. But one that I’m really enjoying and has given me some excellent experiences of travelling to different parts of the world and doing some amazing stuff and meeting some amazing people in the community as well.
What does the cloud advocate position entail?
My role can be quite varied. A summary of my job is to help others find out how to use Microsoft Technologies. Whether that be by telling the story in a simplified manner, maybe in a blog post or a video that kind of connects the dots between. For example, what your on-prem system looks like and what your cloud system would look like.
I’m sure we’ve all read some official documentation on various different products. Not just Microsoft products, and not understood what they were talking about. Being able to digest that into a way that makes sense for everybody. Whether that be someone who’s a project manager or someone who has 100 years of experience in IT, and being able to get that story across to them is something that I do. So, my day can be quite varied.
It can be creating videos, creating blogs, doing podcasts… Or it can be just playing with technology, or creating new Microsoft Learn content as well. There are lots of different facets, and there are lots of different things I can do throughout the day. So it can be quite fun. And obviously, Covid has stopped me from travelling, so that would have been a big part of my job had we not had a pandemic. But we’re making it work.
Besides being a cloud advocate for Microsoft, you also have a personal blog and do a weekly update on YouTube as Techielass. How do the two intertwine? Do you usually post work-related stuff, separate both worlds, or a mix of both?
I think it’s a bit of both to be honest. Because a lot of people know me as Techielass and from before I was a cloud advocate, through my blog. Some things like my weekly update on YouTube was something that I actually started in anticipation for this job. Because I knew I would have to be on camera or I knew I’d have to do some presentations for this job.
I started that weekly update nearly two years ago now, to basically get more familiar with looking at the camera and being able to connect to it and doing all the things that go around video production and so that that’s kind of interlinked. Although it’s become a kind of side project because I just enjoy doing that kind of medium as well.
My blog is sometimes intertwined with my job. You’ll find me, you know, blogging about random things that I find. I’ve been supporting my husband and working from home lately. So there’s some random support ticket type questions he’s asked me that I’ve blogged about, because I know he’s going to ask me in about 6 weeks’ time. And I’m not going to remember how I did it, so yeah, there’s various different things on my blog.
So yeah, my blog kind of intertwines with my job, but it’s not necessarily always about my job.
Is there anything in particular that you like to blog about within the world of Azure?
I think I’ve tried to specialise in data centre migrations. I think we’ve probably all been involved in an on-prem data centre migration. And I’ve tried to take some of that experience and that knowledge and transfer it into how you would actually migrate to the cloud.
So, you’ll find me talking a lot about migrating. I tend to talk more about the processes around that nowadays rather than the technology because I think that’s a part of the journey that a lot of people struggle with. We can understand the technology quite easily, I think. But trying to put that into practice; how you think about things like training your staff; and how you change that culture within your organization; how do start the project for your migration…
So, I talk a lot about data centre migrations and, although I talk a lot about the culture and the process around it. You’ll find me talking about Azure migrate quite a bit and intertwining that into how you actually do your data centre migration. So that’s kind of my specialty, what a lot of people reach out to me and ask about.
What are the biggest mistakes being made in this data centre migration to the cloud, especially now that some companies might be rushing their transition because of the pandemic?
I think lots of people forget to actually assess what they have inside their on-prem data centre right now. They want to get to the actual delivery part. They want to get to put some resources in Azure, and they want to prove the value and say “we’ve completed that project”. And, like you say, some have been rushing because of Covid and the challenges that it’s thrown up.
I always try and say: take a step back, have a look at what’s in your environment. Try and understand not only the technology in your environment, but also what your staff needs are. So, your technology is going to have a bunch of needs when you move it to the cloud. Things are maybe not even going to be able to be moved to the cloud because they’re legacy. Or they’re far too complex, etc.
But what about the the staff within your environment as well? Do people know how to use Azure once you’ve moved into that? I think it that can often be a stumbling block as well. I’ve seen some customers who bring in third-party companies to do the migration. They move all the technology and then that third-party company leaves. The staff don’t have any clue on how to support the things that are now in Azure.
And before you know it, they’ve got into this situation where they think that the cloud is rubbish. Because the staff haven’t been able to support it because they themselves haven’t been supported in learning it. That’s why I always say that a data centre migration is about technology and people, so make sure you’re investing in the staff within your IT department.
Also, make sure you’re looking towards the end users, the people that use these applications that are in your data centre. Do you know how they use them? Is this an opportunity to ditch some of the ones that they hate? Is it that time to look at new solutions?
So, technology and people are the things you should be thinking about in your data centre migration.
What advice would you give to other IT specialists who might want to get into community relations and advocacy?
If you want to get into the community space, try and do it in your spare time. I know that’s a big ask, because we probably don’t have a lot of spare time, (I definitely don’t have a lot of spare time myself), but it’s definitely a job you have to have a passion for because it’s very different from the technology world, from being a consultant, from being an engineer.
There are so many facets to it. I do things in marketing, I do video editing, I do image creation. I’m a bit of a designer occasionally. I’m also a technical writer. I have to be a presenter.
There’s a ton if things before I even get to the technology. Sme days might I don’t even touch any of the technology because I’m in things like Adobe Creative Cloud, so that’s a big change.
If you’re not ready to give up the toolbox, if you’re not ready to give up playing with the technology. Then it’s not something for you right now, and that’s why I say do it in your spare time, because, if you find that and you enjoy doing these things, if you enjoy doing podcasts, if you enjoy doing videos you enjoy doing the blogging, you’ll naturally find that you’ll progress more and more to that and away from being hands on the tools as such.
I see a lot of people wanting the glamour, but they don’t realise that there’s a lot of time where you’re actually not touching technology. But it is a great job. It has offered me fantastic opportunities , but I think a lot of people need to be aware of the fact that there’s so much to it and it’s not just talking about tech all the time.
And your advice for the larger IT community?
Besides that, just support people who are creating content, whether that be people like myself that do it as a job or whether it be people doing it as a hobby. It definitely means a lot, even if it’s just a small like on a YouTube video or a retweet on Twitter. That means a whole load to us as content creators.
So, definitely support people when they do that, because it can make a massive difference. That 10-minute video could have taken me like 3 days to create so that small little like on a YouTube video means the world to me and it means that I actually spend my time valuably.
