Guest Post by Paul Chapman
Formerly Vice President, Global Infrastructure & Cloud Operations at VMware, currently CIO of HP Software at Hewlett-Packard
This is the second post in our series highlighting recertification and the importance of keeping technical skills current. Read the first post here.
Constant change is the steady state of the IT industry. When it comes to our careers that holds especially true. Core technical competencies come and go, technologies change, and the market demand for a set of skills simply shrinks, so we can only control our own skills and abilities.
I’ve gotten to a point in my career where people come to me for advice and what I often tell them is that technical aptitude can only get you so far. Certifications are an important tool to help you achieve success: they are a springboard.
Because product cycles are becoming quicker, the re-certification part is another important aspect of keeping your skills current. Years ago, when VMware’s certifications first began, the lifecycle of an application used to be much longer. It used to be that you could go out and get certified and the certification would remain current for a long time because the release cycles were so much longer. But today, quicker version releases of software and capabilities mean there’s a significant increase in work to remain current on latest release — the recertification process becomes an important way to keep up.
But there’s another level of your career: the next step, the big leap. What happens all too often is that someone is strong technically and takes steps to build technical skills, but fails to migrate from individual contributor to manager and then leader because they want to hold onto core technical expertise as long as they can. Even those who have stepped outside a comfort zone can (and often do) go back when things get uncomfortable. But in that discomfort is the ability to grow, change, and transform–both as an individual and as an organization.
A similar thing happens when you’re going to do a parachute jump: as you inch yourself towards the door, you can still back out. But once you’re out of that plane, you’re out, and there’s no going back. When people get into a managerial role, the moment before jumping out of that plane they get fearful and resist. By staying in the plane and not making that leap into an area of discomfort, you’re not progressing in your career.
Whether you’re coordinating or building the services that people are subscribing to, the shift in IT is happening in buying and managing services, not in the group that builds the services. Now it’s about who’s building versus running and managing the service. In IT, the management path means making a shift from being skilled in the technical arena to being more skilled in managing sets of services to deliver something valuable to the enterprise. For example, in buying tenet operations and backup as a service.
Finding Meaning
If you’re working for a company that does meaningful work, you will automatically gain experience through a multitude of different things. (Non-meaningful work is what you make of it, even if a company itself is doing meaningful work, but it’s not enhancing your breadth of experience, then it’s not meaningful to you.)
Today, a lot of organizations are looking for breadth of experience. I spent years as a COBOL programmer (and you’ll find that in the bowels of my resume, just don’t ask me to program any COBOL). If I had latched onto COBOL and never let it go, then I certainly wouldn’t be sharing this advice with you today. So my advice is this: Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. If you put your resume in drawer for a year and nothing has changed, you’ve wasted a year and your personal market cap hasn’t changed. Your resume needs to be a story that shows progression.
I’m a firm believer in IT professionals taking on rotational assignments, getting off the flagpole of expertise, and moving to a different role. So it’s especially important to be part of an organization that allows you to do that in a non-threatening way.
It’s like being in the shallow end of the pool with floaties. If you never move toward the deep end, you’ll never struggle and learn. Of course, if you’re in the deep end with concrete boots on doing things that are too far over your head, you’ll fail as well. But the question is always: how do I move to the middle of the pool where I’m treading water and not sinking? After treading water for awhile and learning, eventually the shallow end will move to you. It’s about doing that in a progressive, ongoing basis. All too often people get uncomfortable and go back to the shallow end. You have to spend time being uncomfortable to progress.
I spoke to a group of students recently and I’ll share the career advice I gave them:
- Migrate from individual contributor to manager to leader
- Understand your business and how automation and agility can improve operations
- Volunteer for high-profile assignments
- Play a major role in large global programs
- Gain M&A integration experience
- Develop external peer groups and networks
- They call it work – because it is
- Work hard because nothing worth gaining is gained without effort
As IT professionals, you have to be willing to give up areas of technology expertise to be part of the next wave or next movement and progress. Where can your career take you tomorrow?
For more information on the recertification policy, please visit www.vmwarerecertification.com or contact [email protected].
