Written by: Iris Polit
Our team is looking forward to VMware Explore 2022 US next week. For this year’s People & Culture track, we are taking a fresh approach by including fireside chats with senior tech professionals, interactive sessions, and tools to develop leadership and career skills.
Whether you are looking for ways to grow your career or unlock your team’s potential, join us to explore new professional development paths, harness the power of inclusive innovation, and discover the benefits of sustainable, diverse, and thriving workplaces.
Review the list below to explore your options and add them to your favorite sessions today.
Career Growth Fireside Chats
Learn how to take your career to the next level by hearing firsthand from a senior tech professional about their personal career journey. Our guest speakers will share lessons learned, tips for success, and unexpected surprises they encountered along their career path.
- Career Growth Fireside Chat: Cloud Path [PCB2367US] with Mark Fournier, CIO, US Senate Federal Credit Union
- Career Growth Fireside Chat: DevOps Path [PCB2364US] with Ngook Kong, VP of Cloud Services Engineering & DevOps, Entrust Corporation
- Career Growth Fireside Chat: Security Path [PCB2368US] with George Lewis, Sr. Manager, Global Information Security, Topcon
People & Culture Highlighted Sessions
Inclusive Innovation: The Solutions You Need Are Already in the Room [PCB2370US]
Highly effective tech professionals and teams foster trust, empathy and an ability to productively communicate across silos and celebrate lifelong learning. Join Mary Poffenroth, a biopsychologist and creative neurohacker, for some Lego Serious Play (LPS) to learn easy-to-master strategies for addressing times of change and curbing circular thinking. LPS helps to set you free with thinking through your hands, resulting in visual articulation of complex problems and solutions while building trust, empathy and buy-in.
Speaker: Mary Poffenroth, Biopsychologist & Creative Neurohacker, Poffenroth Consulting
How to Thrive in Today’s Remote or Hybrid Workplace [PCB2921US]
As organizations sort out what a “post-COVID” workplace looks like, many individuals and managers have already realized successful remote and hybrid workstyles. Join us for a lively discussion and practical advice to help you thrive in a remote or hybrid workplace. A panel of your peers will be joined by Guadalupe Hugony, Senior Director of Employee Experience for End-User Computing (EUC) at VMware, to share:
- How to build an inclusive environment in a hybrid workplace
- Lessons learned as individual contributors and people managers
- Collaboration and productivity tips for extroverts and introverts
- And much more
Discover how you, too, can thrive in the new normal.
Speakers:
Guadalupe Hugony, Sr Director, Employee Engagement and Programs, EUC, VMware
Travis Robertson, IT Director, Toppan Interamerica, Inc.
Diego Izquierdo, Sr. Cloud Engineer, CBN
Jim Kohl, Devops Consultant, GAIG
Turn the Great Resignation into Your Great Reboot [PCB2371US]
Do you dread Mondays? With more than 2.5 million job openings in tech available today, you don’t have to. Join us for a lively discussion and practical advice to help you leverage the Great Resignation to reboot your career. During this session, a panel of your peers will share what they learned from their recent job changes. They will be joined by Iris Polit, a career transition and personal branding strategist, who will reveal how you, too, can map out a plan to take advantage of the abundant opportunities available and make your dream job a reality.
Speakers:
Iris Polit, Sr. Program Manager, Employee Engagement, VMware
Cody De Arkland, Head of Developer Relations, LaunchDarkly
Ernesto Tey, VP of Global Strategic Alliances, Forter
Carlota Sage, vCISO Principal, Fractional CISO
From SE to VP: Amanda’s Journey to the Americas CTO at VMware [PCB1232US]
Join this fun career session to learn about the technical and soft skills Amanda learned to become VMware’s first woman CTO. Learning the fundamentals of any position is necessary to be successful. However, the career path and the skills required to move from systems engineer to chief technology officer have never been documented—until now. This session is applicable to everyone, regardless of current job role and aspirations for the future.
Speaker: Amanda Blevins, VP and CTO, Americas, VMware
Sessions from VMware Instructors at the CXS Theater
Your Journey with Learning into the Multi-Cloud Universe [CXS2976US]
Are you making the journey to multi-cloud and not sure how you or your team’s skills apply across the products that make up the 5 Cross-Cloud Services pillars? VMware Learning is here to help! Join us and explore VMware Learning’s Knowledge and Skills Assessment (KSA) including Skills Mapping to Cloud Centric Personas. We will cover key skills and learning objectives for adoption and migration to cloud.
Speaker: Brett Guarino, Senior Technical Trainer, VMware
Demystifying Distributed Security [CXS1895US]
VMware NSX Distributed Firewall and NSX Distributed IDS/IPS provide security services in the kernel through processing of rules and signatures intrinsically within the virtual networking infrastructure. So how does it work? We will show the inner workings of the distributed services from an architectural standpoint and, more importantly, the best implementation techniques, as well as troubleshooting tools for examining the effectiveness of the strategy deployed. We will show how to simplify the configuration of the centrally managed protection mechanisms, and greatly reduce the time and effort needed to put a tight security policy in place.
Speaker: Tim Burkard, Staff Technical Instructor, VMware
The (Not So) Dark Art of Application Packaging and Profiling [CXS2450US]
VMware App Volumes and VMware Dynamic Environment Manager are phenomenal tools that help administrators deliver a consistent virtual desktop and application experience for end users. They allow us to create a highly customized environment on the fly without having to do any special work for troublesome users. Sometimes, however, delivering certain applications and the settings for those applications may require us to dive in a little deeper than we would have hoped. In this session, we will uncover some advanced packaging and profiling techniques used by the professionals that help take the mystery out of even the most stubborn and troublesome applications.
Speakers: Linus Bourque, Principal Instructor, VMware and Joe Cooper, Principal Instructor, VMware
