The theme for the 2015 LabMan Conference (held at UNT in Denton, TX) is sustainability, and this closing keynote presentation talks about sustaining your career.
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Sustaining Your Career
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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