I’ve been what I’d call a Windows admin/engineer for the past 15 years. I’ve worked at for MSPs whose customer base varied from mom and pop shops to multi-national companies. I’ve worked in-house as a generalist who covered all aspects of IT (side note: printers are concentrated evil and you can’t change my mind). I’ve had my hands in some light network management, deployed a few smaller VMware environments. One oddity which I actually enjoyed was managing telephony systems. But at the end of the day, I was still predominately managing Windows Servers and everything in that ecosystem (Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, and so on)
I’ve been very fortunate that in each of those companies I’ve had fantastic bosses. They have allowed me to attend various trainings and conferences which allowed me to grow my skills. I was given opportunities to work on some stuff I probably shouldn’t have been allowed to. While some of these endeavors failed miserably, the vast majority of the time I walked away with a project completed successfully. Each time this happened it gave me the confidence to go try that next thing that 6 months ago I thought was a pipe dream.
Around 2016 I started to become more interested in this thing called Azure. Trying to understand what it is and more importantly, the benefits over on-premises infrastructure. I started to play with it and learn the various ways that I could leverage it, even got certified in it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to put what I was learning into my daily activities. And as expected, if you don’t use it, you start to lose it.
After a few more years it became even more obvious that Azure and the entire cloud movement is not going away. While I firmly believe on-premises infrastructure is also here to stay in one capacity or another, I felt comfortable with that. I wanted to become more involved with Azure and the cloud native way of doing things. With this in mind, I started to look for opportunities that were more in line with where I wanted to take my career.
I took a shot at a company I found via Google’s Job Search. From what I could see on their web site and social media, they seemed to be doing some awesome stuff in the cloud. I didn’t know anyone there personally. I didn’t have any direct LinkedIn connections. I just applied via the website. It would be remote work as well since their closest office was over 3 hours away. It was definitely a long shot, to say the least. The short version is they thankfully took a chance on me.
Fast forward to today, I’m. Loving. It. I’ve been using Azure on almost a daily basis. I’ve been given some amazing training opportunities. Between the hands-on learning and training, I’ve obtained 3 Azure certifications in the last 7 months. I’ve been able to get involved with some really exciting work with Azure DevOps. I’m being exposed to stuff I’ve been wanting to learn for awhile and given the tools to make it happen.
If you would have told me a year ago where I’d be today, I would have called bullshit and walked away.
So now you’re asking yourself why did I listen to this yahoo ramble on about his past and his new job? Because I want you to know that you can do it too!! I will be honest and say I’ve always felt extremely lucky throughout my career. And while there are countless times I could have done more, I always felt like I was doing something to make myself better. While there may not be a 1:1 correlation, I guarantee you that it has helped me when an amazing job has come along.
Now more then ever there are opportunities for you to grow your skills. There are free trials of almost any tool out there that you can use to learn from. Whatever it is, I’d also bet there a ton of blog posts and YouTube videos out there of people showing how to use that tool. And they did that because they want you to learn how to do it too!!
The 2 simple things that are so hard to do is start, and keep going. My suggestion is to pick something you want to learn and then block off some time for that. It doesn’t have to be a long period, even a half-hour to start with. When that time comes, take a few minutes and check out the vendor’s site and see their “Getting Started” guide or do a search for “How do I learn XYZ”. Now that you have a general idea of how to get started, don’t waste any more time over-analyzing how to learn it. START DOING IT!
By doing a simple “Getting Started” guide you will learn more about that tool or feature and how it works. From there your mind will start to think, what about this, and what about that? Write those items down so next time you have something to jog your memory and can jump right back in. Before you are done, schedule another block of time to continue learning. Doing these steps each time will help you log your process but also help ensure you keep going.
Going back to the “why” for this post. There have been countless times where someone has answered a question I had one of the various forums. They have written a blog post that showed how to fix whatever oddity they encountered (which I did too). Recently I have even found a few posts where someone has chronicled their journey to where they are now. I know this post form Taz Brown certainly helped light a fire for me.
There have also been many people who I’ve personally met that have had a profound impact on my life. Each of these people has taken their time to help me in one way or another and I am forever grateful for that.
I wanted to start blogging as a way to give back to the community that has helped shape my career into what it is today. It is my attempt to pay it forward and a way to say “Thank You!” for all those that have helped me get here today. I’m hopeful that this post will help you realize no matter where you are in your journey, you can become what you want to be. You just have to start and keep going!!