Speaker 0 | 00:05.698

All right, well, hey, it’s Mike Kelly, and I’d like to welcome you all to another episode of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, where we’re allowed to geek out with our fellow nerds. So today, I’m proud to introduce JD Whitlock, who brought up a really interesting thought during our intro call. However, first, I’d like to hear a little about who you are and why you’re being called a nerd.

Speaker 1 | 00:27.870

Hey, Mike, great to meet you. You know, I like geek instead of nerd, but it’s your part to go with nerds. So I am chief information officer at Dayton Children’s Hospital, Dayton, Ohio. I’ve been doing health care IT for a lot of years, over 20 health care, in health care close to 30 years. I’m retired military. And so I’m passionate about all things health care IT and data. And I do a lot of career mentoring, counseling, both with my own team and just with a lot of younger folks in general in IT. And that’s what we’re here to talk about.

Speaker 0 | 01:12.899

Yeah. So I got to ask, because I go by Doug Geek. So why do you prefer geek over nerd?

Speaker 1 | 01:20.185

That’s a good question. Nobody’s ever asked me that. My wife will say nerd derogatorily.

Speaker 0 | 01:26.791

Yeah.

Speaker 1 | 01:27.351

I say it. I like geek better. It’s just becoming joke between us. I guess that’s all it is.

Speaker 0 | 01:32.233

For me, it’s because of that movie, Revenge of the Nerds.

Speaker 1 | 01:37.415

Oh, yeah. There you go. Yeah, you’re right.

Speaker 0 | 01:39.816

I’m old enough to have been influenced by that.

Speaker 1 | 01:42.798

Yeah. This is right.

Speaker 0 | 01:44.598

So I was always a little more proud of being a geek. But then one of my friends reminded me that geeks are the guys that bit the heads off the chickens at circuses. So I’m like, wait. But so, so you kind of flipped the tables on me when we, when we did our initial call and started talking about what, what we wanted to talk about. And you talked about how sometimes the management tracker or the constant growth within it isn’t always the best thing. You know, we, we start down this career path and we think that, oh, I’ve got to get to being the CIO to. be able to say, I’ve made it. And you’re saying no. So tell me.

Speaker 1 | 02:31.684

Exactly. Yeah. So one thing that I always say, I think it’s a very important topic in sort of career mentoring in IT in general, is that we are very, very blessed. One of the many reasons we’re blessed to be IT professionals is because you can have a very successful career. both in terms of the quality of the work and the happiness of you doing the work and in terms of the money that you are being paid for it without being a manager. That is not true of most other professions. Most other professions, if you want to make more money, you have to go be a boss at some level. But in IT, if you are smart about staying up to date on what the hot technology is, That is, good salaries are being paid for, you know, if you can stay one or two steps ahead and thoughtfully educate yourself. And now, of course, it’s so easy to get certifications and educate yourself because, of course, so much is going on in the cloud and the cloud vendors want to educate you so that they have lots of developers and cloud architects and engineers. et cetera, et cetera, on their platform. And that’s how they make more money. It’s like they’re, it’s like they’re pushing the, all this free training. Sometimes you got to pay a little bit for the certification test, right? For a proctored exam. Right. But you can do so much without a lot of formal education and without really any management experience or need to get management experience and make very good money. So I just always want to, I want people to know that you only have to do the management track in IT if you want to do the management track in IT. So,

Speaker 0 | 04:27.983

and you know, it’s, it’s so true. I I’ve seen it. It, unfortunately, I don’t think it really felt like that, or it didn’t really seem like that. When I started in IT, it seemed like management was the way that you had to go. And so we were always striving to, to become the. supervisor and the boss and to get that ego stroke, really, of being the leader. I’m not even a genre within technology and becoming really good at that. And, you know, to another point in that same venue of just on the job training, they I know I always tried my best to make sure that my team had access to even paid for trainings and just try to get them to continue to teach themselves and to learn. And. and make themselves more valuable. And we would always pay them more as they got those certifications, like you’re talking about. And as they became more valuable on any given kind of expertise, they, if they really love being in the back room, just staring at the server screens and running command line, there was, there’s a place for them, but that’s not the only one. I mean, there’s so, so much cybersecurity there’s. The AI stuff that they’re going to play with now? Other thoughts around this?

Speaker 1 | 06:00.510

Well, so certainly there’s lots of important things going on with AI, obviously. But of course, AI is going to majorly impact so many areas of development, right? So some of the AI gurus are saying, don’t even bother learning to… code anymore. That’s a little bit extreme, maybe, but, but, you know, it’s AI generative AI is going to make your existing developers so much more efficient. There may be some less need for as many developers in some of the traditional development languages that we’re using today. Right. The other side of that is there’s going to be so much work in AI that,

Speaker 0 | 06:47.814

um, I’m going to try to code the AI. What’s that? They said, somebody’s got to code the AI.

Speaker 1 | 06:56.044

Well, yeah, but like comparatively few jobs doing that. And then one of the controversial things, right, is all the prompt engineering. And what does that actually look at? And how much of a true technical skill is that? I’ve heard smart people say, look, you’re going to have 80% of the value that people are going to get out of AI is going to be from the more commodity. platforms, right, the CHEFs of the world and the equivalent, that it’s going to be either free or very low cost, right? But then there are going to be specialized things in different industries that, you know, vertical needs in healthcare. You know, we got to, things have to plug into the electronic health record and be in a clinical workflow and not hallucinate if you’re trying to help the doctor do something, right? So, and then there’s going to be, there’s going to be money to be made for all those specialized things, even though it might be a minority of the, of the use cases and the people using it. So anyways, that, that all goes back to try to try to listen to as many smart people as you can try to predict the future a little bit. So the skill sets that you are teaching yourself, if you want to be the, the get deep expertise and not do the management track you’re you are learning the right things that are going to be around at least for the next five or ten years it may not be able to predict the future farther than that but you can always adjust later so and and i’d even contend that you don’t have to be at the bleeding edge you can be at the leading or even a little behind it as long as you’re staying

Speaker 0 | 08:37.178

up towards the front of the pack versus at the back of the pack because Then you’re one of the ones that’s learning this stuff and figuring it out in the beginning. And that adds value to your career and your ability to…

Speaker 1 | 08:54.150

By the way, here’s an example of that. There’s always a demand for the basics. And if you… Because another career path, of course, is doing something entrepreneurial. And I’m not talking about being the next Mark Zuckerberg. I’m talking about start an IT services company. that helps small businesses with the very basics of cybersecurity and email management. And you know how many small businesses are struggling with, because they don’t know what DMARC is, right? They don’t know the correct email config. They’re getting on with the cheapest cloud services they can get on, and they don’t really understand. They need somebody trusted that can handle some of this stuff for them. And I’ve seen in some of my… I’m in a business networking group and I see that so commonly, you know, people need help with small businesses need help with basic IT services, cybersecurity, internet marketing from local people that they can trust because there’s so many scammers out there. That’s a whole nother thing you can do, you know, career wise with IT that is potentially very lucrative. If you have the that’s a whole nother that’s a whole nother set of skills you need. Right.

Speaker 0 | 10:11.412

So it’s a broad set to that one. You got to have some some definite brought or with that that knowledge set so that you can cover all of those different things. But but if you do it and you’ve got to. Well, you got to have a little bit of that personality to be able to go talk to these people, find out what they need and help them understand what they have to have versus what what they’re being told they need, because so much of it’s oversold.

Speaker 2 | 10:42.277

At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is Internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing Internet connectivity. Few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems never ending from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team. and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes at Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power and massive economy of scale to map. all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data, to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts. so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, we are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at… popular it.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.

Speaker 0 | 13:02.029

So, um, but I still found it a very interesting thought and, and I see the reality in it, um, that you don’t have to go to management. You find the career, find the technology, find the topics that interest you. and feed you as you learn them and get a chance to play with them and stay there. You become more of an expert there. We love to call them SMEs.

Speaker 1 | 13:29.941

Yes, exactly.

Speaker 0 | 13:31.182

So subject matter expert.

Speaker 1 | 13:33.402

Yep. Be the SME that everybody needs in the hot fang that is reimbursed.

Speaker 0 | 13:39.905

Well, the thing that you just like, I mean, yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 | 13:44.187

But hopefully there’s a Venn diagram over what you enjoy doing and what other people want to.

Speaker 0 | 13:48.229

pay well for it yeah for sure because uh studying cobalt right is not or getting certification in cobalt anymore is probably not one of the best career advancing moves right um one of the other things that we kind of talked about was you know managers over it departments who didn’t grow from within the department who are coming from outside i’m I interviewed a lady that’s the CIO of another organization and, and she got there from a county and just because she had some, she actually had some really good organizational skills and some project management. So then next thing she knew she was leading the largest, um, implementation that that IT department had ever done. And after making it successful, then they’re like, okay, you need to stay there and help us continue to make. IT work.

Speaker 1 | 14:45.725

Right, right. Yeah, so good IT leaders have to, of course, understand both the business and the IT. That’s not exactly… new information. So good IT leaders have always needed to be. And so you can come at that, you can grow up a geek or a nerd, take your pick, and then learn about the business very intentionally and partner with the business leaders very intentionally and be good at that. Or alternately, you can do the opposite and you know the business and then over time… You learn the technology. Really, that’s sort of what I did because I started out in healthcare, not in the IT side. And then I got into the IT side. This was in the military where you are intentionally a little broader and intentionally put into different areas within healthcare. So that when military has to fly across the world and set up hospital in the desert, they need some generalists. And so it’s done that way intentionally, whereas more so on the civilian side, you pick, you know, are you going to do IT or finance or logistics and you sort of stay with that. So that’s how I got into it initially. And then I just liked it and I stayed it. And now I’ve been doing it long enough. I can sort of trick people into think that I know what I’m talking about on the technical side. But the reason that I understand the business side is because I actually did that before I got into IT. So either of those can be successful. And typically, if, well, I mean, you start one place or the other. So you could start in IT, want to be an IT leader, where then you have to go learn business. And you might have to make decisions about, do you want to focus in? on a vertical where it’s going to be easier to learn business if you’re focusing on a vertical like healthcare or fintech or whatever it is or manufacturing as opposed to just hopping around. I don’t know how many people listen to this podcast that are going the other way of no business and want to get into IT leadership. Probably not too many. So we don’t have to worry about that,

Speaker 0 | 17:15.160

right? Yeah. Well, we kind of assume that. based off of the name and everything else. And just the, the topics that we talk about, however, I, you know, I always kind of told myself and told people that I was bringing into the team, Hey, you know, as long as you fit the team, I can teach you the technology. You know, it’s, it’s about your attitude. It’s about how you handle this stuff. It’s about how you handle those failures. You know, how do you handle the dress? How do you handle. But when you got somebody calling you on the help desk, you got a manager breathing over your shoulder, both sides are yelling at you. And all you’re trying to do is be kind and help. How well do you handle that? And if you can handle that, I can teach you the technology.

Speaker 1 | 18:02.152

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. We have a really good service desk team at the Jordans. And it’s because our service desk supervisor hires for good people skills because you can hire people off the street that have an A-plus certification. But they may or may not be able to talk to fellow human beings. And so we only hire the ones that know how to talk to the other human beings. And we have a good service desk team.

Speaker 0 | 18:25.835

And I definitely came from the world of, you know, we had to cut our teeth in the help desk or the service desk. And then you could, you know, once you showed some skills, then you could start to head down a specific career path and do networking or phones or system admin. Or, you know, security. But now…

Speaker 1 | 18:47.853

I’m sorry, you’re saying,

Speaker 0 | 18:48.634

but now it doesn’t work like that?

Speaker 1 | 18:51.616

We still do it that way.

Speaker 0 | 18:52.877

Yeah, it’s kind of a mix. But now I can take more control over my destiny by starting to teach myself and then show that aptitude along the lines that I want, kind of like you were talking about. That’s why when you said it, it made perfect sense to me about, you know, this is one of the career fields… where we don’t have to aim towards to be the king, you know, because there’s only one king, but I can be happy in any number of the expertise or the fields that are within IT. And the number of fields within IT just keep growing. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, we weren’t talking about fintech. We weren’t talking about op tech. We weren’t talking about, or we had started talking about DevOps. But now… I mean, IT is everywhere and technology is just everywhere. And so, you know, it’s, um,

Speaker 1 | 19:52.246

tell me a little more about your military and how long were you in military i was in the military for for 20 years and now the first seven years were not in health care i was a navy surface warfare officer for seven years driving ships around and um so as a as a junior officer in military you get put into you’re a manager immediately even though you have absolutely no idea what you’re doing um and then you have to you know learn you’re learning how to managed people and whatever it is you’re supposed to be managing my first job was auxiliary officer on a destroyer which meant that all the mechanical stuff that was not attached to the propeller all the mechanical stuff in the engine rooms that were not attached propeller was was my responsibility so weird things would break at 3am and then i had to go read the tech manual and figure out what had just broke and go explain to the skipper you know what it just broke um and then fix it Yeah, and then have the team that worked for me that actually knew how to fix it, fix it. And so that was a, well, one of the Navy, I don’t know if they still use this advertising line they did back when I joined, it was get responsibility fast. And that was absolutely true. So I got a lot of responsibility fast, sort of forced into being a… manager, I would say that I’m, I’m, that’s not a natural gift of mine. I’m not the guy that walks in the room and instantly, you know, is in charge of things. Um, but also if you do that long enough and you sort of have some concept of what works and what doesn’t work and how to, you know, get things done and still hopefully be a, a decent person that people respect. That’s the goal, right?

Speaker 0 | 21:46.953

Right.

Speaker 1 | 21:47.750

That, that, and I’ve been doing that for a long time. So seven years in, I switched to the Air Force and healthcare administration. Technically I got out and got back in, I got a master’s in healthcare administration. And then, so last 13 years I was doing healthcare administration, halfway through that, I switched into, into IT. So I, so, so broad healthcare operational experience in a very large health system. retired from the Air Force and was in a approximately similar size, large health system, Mercy Health, now Bon Secours Mercy Health out of Cincinnati before it came to the Children’s. And so, so anyways, lots of healthcare operational experience. I pull from, I regularly pull from my experience going many years back into the, some of the military health. um, things, um, uh, on a routine basis. Um,

Speaker 0 | 22:52.652

yeah. One of the things that you also mentioned was that you brought some business experience into things too. Where’d you pick that up? Cause I, you know, I can kind of see some of it along the way, but it sounded like you had something a little different. So,

Speaker 1 | 23:05.037

um, when, so of course the military is great about education, right. And, um, uh, so I have two master’s degrees when I, when I am. talking to young people doing career mentoring stuff, I always say, you don’t really need two master’s degrees. I got two only because I was in the military and they paid for the second one. I paid for the first one, they paid for the second one. And so the way that worked was I had gotten into the IT side. They said, okay, we’re going to send you back to school. We want people that are doing healthcare IT to actually understand IT, what a concept. And then But then what they let me do was an MBA with a heavy MIS concentration. And so that’s what I did. So I have some business background from that. So I have a business degree. I don’t know if you were referring to some of my entrepreneurial stuff. Is that what you’re talking about?

Speaker 0 | 24:04.398

You just had mentioned that you’d brought business experience into all of this. So I was just wondering what else.

Speaker 1 | 24:11.024

So I didn’t know if you were referring to. the healthcare business that I sort of already talked about. I was doing the healthcare operations before I got into IT. Or I have also done some entrepreneurial things more recently, really just as sort of as a hobby. So I understand something about small businesses. And I did a little bit of internet marketing for small businesses. I do some consulting.

Speaker 0 | 24:40.378

And thus your recommendations earlier about the email security, the internet marketing, all of those kinds of things. Another thing that you brought up that I’ve found has been one of the joys in my IT career. And one of the greatest gifts that I found, too, was that networking. You mentioned that you were involved with a local business group and some IT groups. Talk to the audience a little about that and the value that you found in that.

Speaker 1 | 25:12.220

Sure, absolutely. So unless you are in the middle of… nowhere. I suppose in some rural areas, it’s going to be a lot harder to do, but most places, you know, small, small city and bigger. So in Ohio, we have a, that’s called technology first. And there’s usually some local IT networking group, right? Your company that you work for may be a member and you don’t even know about it, but whatever that is, look it up, go to those events. They’re there. They typically have some. A mix of almost like a lunch and learn concept, right? Or a happy hour sort of a concept. Go learn about something. Someone’s telling you about what they do and you’re having a beer with other IT people and getting to know people. And that could be where your next great job opportunity comes from. And so just sort of networking one-on-one, make an effort. And because sometimes the personalities that get into IT are not always, sometimes that’s maybe painful for people to do. They don’t want to go meet people. They want to sit in code or do whatever on the IT side. You know, that may be a little out of your comfort zone. So I would argue that you should do a little bit of that, even if you, well, okay, so. Let’s say you want to go the subject matter expert track and go in depth on something. Find that group. Maybe it’s not local, right? Maybe it’s if you’re doing cybersecurity at SANS or whatever that group is. Find that. Be intentional about networking with people. Get on LinkedIn. Connect with the leaders in that area. And so you should be doing that kind of networking, even if you don’t want to do the management track. If you want to do a management track, it’s even more important to do that and just get to know other IT leaders locally. Most people that are more senior in their careers enjoy talking to younger people that earnestly want to get some advice. Most people will make time for that, in particular if it’s within the context of one of these existing.

Speaker 0 | 27:42.196

networking groups yeah and and it’s one like i said it was one of the things that i found a lot of enjoyment in being able to talk to my peers right and you know bringing up oh man we are just struggling with the single sign-on and of course this is back in like 2010 and when single sign-on was not as as ubiquitous as it is today and you know we’ve struggled doing that. And then we, we managed to get it done. And then my peers are like, wait a minute, how’d you do that? And so, you know, I was, it, they would help me solve things. I would help them solve things and we could help each other without hurting the businesses without, you know, giving that competitor that, that edge because everybody struggles with printers.

Speaker 1 | 28:33.750

Right. Right. By the way, another aspect of this, I just thought of, you know, there’s so many. platform plays these days, right? You could be getting really good at Salesforce or Workday or, you know, one of these big platform players that is that there’s a million customers out there. There’s always going to be work helping to implement them, helping to, whether it’s the back-end work or whether it’s the front-end configuring, you know, you could have a a Workday just continues to happen. I’m a little biased. Our ERP is workday. And I just see how well they’re doing in health care, but outside of health care. They’re growing. And they just keep growing. I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon. You know, if that’s something that kind of work is something you’re into, well, then that’s a whole little ecosystem to network.

Speaker 0 | 29:31.998

Oh, for sure. Because then you start to find other experts, people who. succeeded and done these things and and they they don’t mind helping you out and teaching you how to how to accomplish that goal most of us don’t and and anybody that’s joined these networking circles isn’t going to be the kind of person that’s going to be oh no i’m i can’t tell you how to do that otherwise they wouldn’t be in the in that networking circle yeah that’s not the type of person that joins that right um any other thoughts any trouble tickets that you know the any of those war stories for it that you’ve you’ve struggled with or come across or something that something fun to tell us um you you know what i really i don’t know about

Speaker 1 | 30:16.910

Something fun to tell you, nothing pops to mind, but we spent a long time talking about the sort of counterpoint of the just be an SME. If you want to be an SME, don’t worry about the management. We haven’t actually talked about what about people that do want to do the management. So we probably ought to talk about that a little bit too. And some of the standard advice there is depending on your organization, the size of your organization, the people that are your immediate. boss and boss’s boss, if you do want to start down the management track, you may or may not be able to do that in your current organization. It just depends. Maybe your boss is really good and it’s five years older than you, is going to be in the organization for 30 years and there’s not an opportunity to get that first supervisory position unless you leave that organization. And so that is something that you’re going to have to be ready to do if you want to, if you know you want to do the supervisory track. And so just be conscientious about that and be looking for those opportunities. Sometimes you get lucky. Sometimes you stick around and just focus on doing the work and then opportunities happen into your organization because you’re… Your bosses appreciate your work and give you opportunities when those supervisor opportunities come up, even if that means moving around horizontally a little bit in the organization sometimes. So there’s a lot to be said for that. But anyways, it’s unlikely that you’re going to stay in one organization and… and get to senior management roles without ever changing organizations these days, typically.

Speaker 2 | 32:11.604

At Dissecting Popular IT Nerds, we expect to win and we expect our IT directors to win. And one of those areas where we know that we can help you win is internet service providers. As an IT director tasked with managing internet connectivity, few vendor relationships can prove more painfully frustrating than the one with your internet service provider. The array of challenges seems… never ending from unreliable uptime and insufficient bandwidth to poor customer service and hidden fees. It’s like getting stuck in rush hour traffic. Dealing with ISPs can try once patients even on the best of days. So whether you are managing one location or a hundred locations, our back office support team and vendor partners are the best in the industry. And the best part about this is none of this will ever cost you a dime. due to the partnership and the sponsors that we have behind the scenes of Dissecting Popular IT Nerds. Let us show you how we can manage away the mediocrity and hit it out of the park. We start by mapping all of the available fiber routes, and we use our $1.2 billion in combined customer buying power in massive economy of scale to map all of your locations, to overcome construction fees, to use industry historical data. to encourage providers to compete for the lowest possible pricing, to negotiate the lowest rates guaranteed, and to provide fast response times in hours, not days. And we leverage aggregators and wholesale relationship to ensure you get the best possible pricing available in the marketplace. And on top of all of this, you get proactive network monitoring and proactive alerts so that you’re not left calling 1-800-GO-POUND-SAN to enter in a ticket number and wonder, why is my internet connection down? In short, We are the partner that you have always wanted, who understands your needs, your frustrations, and knows what you need without you having to ask. So, we’re still human, but we are some of the best, and we aim to win. This all starts with a value discovery call where we find out what you have, why you have it, and what’s on your roadmap. All you need to do is email internet at popularit.net and say, I want help managing all of my internet garbage. Please make my life easier. Thank you. and we’ll get right on it for you. Have a wonderful day.

Speaker 0 | 34:31.515

You’re true, because like I said a little bit ago, you know, there’s only one king. But, you know, if you do start doing this and you’re willing to do that lateral move to either… side, it may be surprising to jump out of IT to go lead something else, to get that chance to take the leadership role and that management role.

Speaker 1 | 35:02.846

Right. And in some organizations, right, completely outside of IT, that’s not where I was going a second ago, but you’re right. That’s another important thing. There’s no better way to learn the business than actually go work on the business side for a while. Right. So if that opportunity presents itself. that may be exactly the best career broadening move. What I was talking about, what may happen more often is you’re moving vertically within IT. You have to learn some significant new skills, but that’s where the leadership opportunity is. That still is a good preparation if you want to, for example, be a CIO someday. Then, yeah, you need to learn the different areas of IT, not just the one you started out in. Right.

Speaker 0 | 35:44.018

And yeah, you may still… Again, back to the King analogy, and for some reason, I just can’t seem to get off of it. But if there’s like three levels below that, so you’ve got your CIO, you’ve got your director of IT, you’ve got your manager of IT, and you’re down on the service desk trying to work your way through there, just like you’re talking about, you may just have to take that opportunity at another organization, but be very deliberate about it to move up to that IT manager. And then look for and cultivate the opportunities to become that director of IT. And whether you change organizations and verticals, hell, going from the Navy to the Air Force, a little bit of a change there.

Speaker 1 | 36:32.412

It was. It was also from a line officer to medical. So that was the bigger, probably bigger difference than going between services. But, you know, for a lot of for most people, that could mean. moving verticals,

Speaker 0 | 36:47.888

right?

Speaker 1 | 36:49.729

Right. And within healthcare, there are some jobs in healthcare IT that are very specifically healthcare. If you’re an analyst that’s doing heavy configuration and an EHR like Epic is our EHR, well, you’re probably not going to hop from that into manufacturing. If you’re a network engineer, you can hop around. Doesn’t really matter.

Speaker 0 | 37:13.042

Yeah, everybody needs a network. whether they know it or not they do even those little small businesses yeah any other thoughts or advice uh nothing else is popping around all right well you know it seems like a natural place for us to tie this off truly appreciate your time today jd thank you for the advice and and kind of turning some of this on on its head and you know it i could see how my world would be different had i followed that sme But I might be very happy doing just that and being able to enjoy that path. I’ve enjoyed my career going after the CIO. Go ahead.

Speaker 1 | 37:54.587

Yeah. One last thought on that is when I don’t want anyone to take away from this conversation, particularly really more junior people, is that you have to decide now. You don’t have to decide. You can just do really well at what you’re assigned to do now and see how things go and decide later. The important thing is. to realize that that is one option is to do the SMU. Right. Don’t feel forced into supervisory work in IT. If the thought of that makes you ill, then you’re not cut out for that. Don’t do it.

Speaker 0 | 38:30.471

Right. And actually, that was going to be the message that I was going to pick up on and toss out there too, was that find what makes you happy. Find what you enjoy so that going to work is… enjoyable. And if you’re enjoying the work that you’re doing, then continue to become better at that. And within that area, it’s not whether it’s management track, whether it’s a specific vertical, whether it’s a specific technology, you know, and enjoy that part of your life. It’s, oh man, how many hours do we have in a week? It’s like 172 and we’re spending 40 to 60 of them. In the office, if not more. So, you know, make sure that you get to enjoy those hours.

Speaker 1 | 39:18.798

Right. So that’s a good place to end it right there.

Speaker 0 | 39:22.600

Yeah. Because we can teach you the technology. All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening to us. Truly appreciate you devoting some time to dissecting popular IT nerds. Thank you for your time today, JD. Truly enjoyed the conversation. If you like the podcast, please make sure to like and. Leave a comment for us on iTunes or wherever you’re picking up the podcast. Thanks, everyone.