I know a number of people don’t see the value of LinkedIn. I, however, find a valuable tool, both as a networking tool and for advice in this continuously morphing economy and job market. Today, I came across this gem with the first line ‘The common advice is to find a stable role with a good team and “vest and chill”.’
I’ve heard that advice for most of my life, though mostly when I was young. Especially to young sailor me. Do the minimum, don’t attract attention…these pieces of advice are rather alluring on the surface. They seem to appease fear, any adversity to risk, to minimise the chances of failure. However, as Mr. LoPrimo, the writer of the post, points out, you’re relying on pure luck. I’ve long given up on that mindset, even though it still haunts me.
For years, I’ve “given plenty of thought” to where I am going. My challenge? There are so many options and variations, it’s so damn hard to pick amongst them. I guess that’s preferable than sitting here after a layoff wondering where I should apply.
I want my career to be more than reacting; I want proactivity, to be ahead of the curve. I don’t want to be playing the game of scrambling to find work again. And to be evolving in a direction of my choice. So I build myself, my mind, pointing towards the future I want.
I’ve been working lately on Coursera’s Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst certificate. I just completed the current course, Harnessing the Power of Data with Power BI. I find this valuable as I don’t know Power BI (BI = Business Intelligence) that well yet. I have extensive experience with Excel and Google Sheets. I studied database theory and design, SQL/MySQL, and created gobs of databases for my Web Development Degree. Power BI is a powerful tool that many organizations want/need for data analysts, which seems like a great fit for me at this juncture of my career. I’ve been working with Excel and the rest of Office for decades. I’ve worked with Oracle and SQL Server databases. I’ve built reports and dashboards. I’ve enjoyed this kind of work to the point of volunteering for it.
So, I’ve slowly been diving in and getting Power BI under my belt. It looks like a key piece for me to evolve into Data Analyst roles, for which I’m pretty excited. Again, it looks like a blend of my skills and interests. Even my current network and server admin work ties in, as databases often live on servers, and thus, networks are crucial.
I’ve heard a LOT about the expected impacts of AI on developers. When I was laid off right at the beginning of the pandemic, I opted to make a career pivot into Web Development, so I’ve paid attention to this trend closely. Add in all the lay-offs within the whole developer community, and this career, so recently highly lucrative, has become rather bleak. So much so that I’ve been looking backwards at returning to admin work (which is one of my two jobs right now). Now I see that admin work will be getting hit pretty hard by AI, too.
Earlier this week, I was on a Google Meet. With that, we used the built-in tool to create meeting notes. And, my God, it worked nicely! I was quite impressed. Now, as a long-time admin, taking and distributing meeting notes has been a significant part of my work. I’m confident that this will be done by AI going forward. And I expect that transition to be pretty quick.
Another key part of being an admin is scheduling travel. I expected AI to be able to coordinate travel pretty well. So, I did an experiment where I gave ChatGPT a very rough itinerary for a multi-stop business trip, asked it to recommend flights and hotels. It did a nice job with a few extra prompts. I had a pretty solid itinerary within 2 minutes. Impressive.
After just these two considerations, I am confident that AI will revolutionize Admin work significantly. With the job outlook for this work bleak (BLS projects a loss of 12,400 admin jobs between 2024 and 2034), and AI eroding the work, I expect it to become harder to find roles. (Yet it’s the main type of work I’m recruiters reach out to me for…go figure). It makes my decision to pivot to web development during the pandemic, and now shifting to data analysis seem that much more prudent.
I’ve been busy the past few weeks. Today I completed the second-to-last course for the Google Project Management certificate: Agile Project Management. The purpose of this series is to help tie together my years of admin work with my passion for technology. I now just need to finish my capstone project. After that, I will work on the Power BI Certificate.
I’m currently seeking to leverage the disparate parts of my career (the years of admin work, studies of web development, data systems, databases, SQL, my weird love of Excel, and my project management work into a hybrid role that leverages my strengths in organization, communication, and data analysis to facilitate seamless technical operations and enhance digital strategies.
Using Google’s Gemini, I am building plans for this work. I have a solid short-term plan in place, and am working on the medium and long-term parts. I’m pretty pleased with what’s been pulled together. I find it a nice use of AI. It can aggregate and summarize research that would take me hours (at best) or days to do.
I’ve also done some re-design on my website as part of the plan. It’s a key part of my communications and marketing. (Side note: I’m not sure I like this new theme, but I’ll give it a bit and see if it grows on me). I have a fair amount of work to do, so I’ll be tackling this in waves.
Thanks for reading all the way through. I have more to talk about with this journey, so subscribe to stay in touch. Most importantly, I appreciate each and every one of you!
I haven’t written about this much, but my current career development focus is on Data Analysis. To start with, I like working in Excel. I’ve found spreadsheets fascinating since the days of Lotus 123. In addition, as many of you know, I spent the Pandemic working on a degree in Web Application and Cloud Development at Edmonds College. During that, I spent a huge amount of time studying data: databases, database construction, SQL, database theory and design. That was some of my favorite coursework.
Recently, I discovered the role of data analyst. It looks like a fantastic blend of these elements. And it’s a growing field, which says a LOT in today’s economic climate! This looks like a way I can make a solid contribution now, and have lots of room to grow. It seems a great blend of my past, my studies, and where I am right now, in order to grow into the future.
Digging a bit deeper, I see some key areas for growth in the short-term.
Data Visualization:
I have not worked with Tableau or Power BI…or any of the other visualization tools. I have created presentations where I manually built visualizations (yay PowerPoint!), mostly graphs, but a few times with PhotoShop. I’m really looking forward to diving in deeper to what I can do with Power BI (which is my next series of course work on Coursera).
Excel:
I’m a solid user of Excel, having it used it extensively in pretty much every role I’ve had in the past 20 or so years. Budgets, project tracking, dashboards, project feasibility, and operations analysis, I’ve done all of these in Excel. But there’s always room to grow! And it’s an evolving product, so even more to keep learning.
Statistics:
I have only a rudimentary understanding of statistics. I want to expand that greatly. I think I’ll take statistics at Edmonds College soon.
These are the short-term learnings I’m planning on feeding myself with. I also think that the WGU BS in Data Analytics looks really interesting. And having that Bachelors will be valuable, and that knowledge critical.
During my studies at Edmonds, we touched on big data, data lakes, data warehouses, as well as No SQL based stored data. This all looks fascinating to me.
I’m wondering at what my path forward looks like. I love technology, in all it’s variety, and blended in insanity. Yet I adore people, too. Helping guide folks, especially in terms of projects. Helping organize people into effective teams, to see the value each of us offer, and to feel the wonderful sensation of meeting goals. That’s delightful to me.
I’ve been told many times over the years that I’d be great as a manager. I wonder, though, as my values don’t align with the current “presentation” of the successful manager. I stand against the idea of people/teams simply being consumables to extract the most value from before they’re discarded.
So, I sit and ponder when I should be sleeping. It is the Way, I guess.
I just updated my LinkedIn profile language to “maximizing the potential of technology”. I’m trying to capture my belief in the positive potential of technology while acknowledging the risks and downsides. My career focus will be technology focused, as a good chunk of my life has been. I’ve enjoyed the past few years of IT being my center focus and am eager to keep that going. A fun aside with this: IT is not that narrow a focus! Data, AI, networking, web development…all of these are so much more are encompassed by the umbrella of “IT”.
As I’ve been building a career plan, my research keeps driving home the importance of networking. Not in terms of information systems, but human connectivity. Now, this is not a new notion to me. And during my years in Real Estate, I saw so many times that it was connections that cemented business success. The main challenge in this: genuineness. Most people aren’t fans of being hit up only when someone wants something from them. “Hey, I don’t know if you remember, but we worked together 10 years ago. Can you help me get a job?” I know it’s wearying.
I’m taking this as a reminder to maintain connection with people I care about. For 2025, I’m making it a point to reach out to those my contacts and start with simply saying “hi”. Folks shouldn’t be in there unless I care about them, right? Now, I have hundreds of people in my contact list. Everyone I’d worked on a project with, was part of team with, all that sort of stuff ended up in my contact list. So, for the first step of this project, I’m going through and cleaning things up. If we worked together on a project 10 years ago, and we haven’t talked since, I’m just going to delete the contact. And I’ve been so bad at managing my contact list that there were people who’d died years ago in there. Yeah, this is a critical first step!
I deeply value my friends, and want you all to be more than potential sources of revenue. Being deliberate about maintaining these connections is but a first step. Yet this is an area that I really want to grow. It feeds my soul.
It looks like the job market’s about to pick up. I’m getting gobs of messages from recruiters. (Most of them are temp agencies, but I still take as a good sign). But I’m getting lots of them like this one:
Am I interested? Well, should I be? There is NOTHING in this description that’s useful. NOTHING! Who? What? When? Where? Salary? I have nothing here that makes me think I should give my time to this, nor my data. Is it with a company I want to work with? Is the salary something I can work with? Is it an urgent temp position that can’t wait for 2 weeks notice?
Right now, I am open to an amazing opportunity, whether that’s pay-wise, work-wise, organization-wise. I have a job (properly, I have two) that I love and am not eager to change. I am not even close to desperate. You’ll need to do better than this.
I’m a bit behind on my 2025 planning. This “bug” I’ve been fighting has sapped away SO much energy. As I’m FINALLY feeling my energy return (at least more of it) this week, I’m starting to map out what my career direction and focus looks like in 2025 and forward.
Quick summary: I spent the pandemic working on a degree in Information Systems with its main focus on Web Development. In a weird twist of fate, I finished it right as the tech sector meltdown was hitting hardest. Competing with 500k+ tech workers has made the transition challenging. But I did land an IT role. Currently, I work 1/2 time as an IT/Systems Analyst for the Edmonds Waterfront Center, and 1/2 as a “tech savvy” Administrative Assistant. I feel like I’m straddling both my past and my future. My vision of my future, though, is to move full-time into IT/Information Systems. And that’s the plan I’m building.
However, that’s not a narrow enough focus. Within this umbrella is a huge array of roles. Network administrator, help desk analyst, web developer, systems analyst, information security, and data analyst….and there’s plenty more! First world problems, a plethora of riches….you know.
Anyway, focus, right?
After looking over my notes, exploring all the projects I’ve worked on the past few years, reviewed the classes I’ve taken, exploring what I’ve found the most fulfilling, most valuable, and even what I thought was the most fun, I have pretty much narrowed things down to what I’ll call “data systems”.
I’ve worked with data in many settings, and have spend many hours with Excel. And I like this stuff! While studying for my ATA, I got to work with a LOT of database systems and tools. Besides extensive projects in Access, I got to do a lot of work with SQL. Not just MySQL, but also SQL Server, and even a few variants of Oracle. I find this stuff endlessly fascinating. And I see that “data” is a huge growth area in our economy. Between data analytics, data security, data warehouses, and data lakes, there’s a huge need for people who both understand these systems and structures, but also, well, enjoy it! My experience with data is pretty extensive as well. From budget tracking for my teams at both Starbucks and Microsoft, creating dashboards for real estate teams, and tracking projects and feasibility for construction companies, I’ve done a lot.
Looking towards the future, I want to dive deeper into key skills. First, Data Visualization. I have studied design and worked extensively with PowerPoint. Power BI and Tableau are a logical next step. Thus, I’ve started the Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst course on Coursera. I also want to build my skills in Python/R and Statistics. Perhaps via the IBM Data Analyst Cert or Google’s Data Analytics Cert. I’ll evaluate that as I move forward.
I recognize the place of privilege I’m in, where I have all these options that I struggle to choose amongst. For that, I’m grateful.
So, I know some of you have experience in this area. I’d love your thoughts on my framework/vision (I’m still turning it into a plan). And if you have any advice, I’d deeply appreciate your thoughts.
