Microsoft Community Insights
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Microsoft Community Insights
Episode 26 - Broaden Your Skillset to help your career with Ian Schreier
What if the key to unlocking your IT career lies in embracing failure and exploring diverse domains? Join us as we uncover this intriguing possibility with Ian Schreier, a principal architect and the mastermind behind Help my IT Career. With nearly three decades of experience, Ian opens up about his journey through the ever-evolving landscape of IT and the vital importance of aligning career paths with personal interests and strengths. His unique insights promise to inspire IT professionals and newcomers alike to broaden their skill sets and refine their career strategies.
Hello, welcome to Microsoft Community Insights Podcast, where we share insights from community experts to stay up to date in Microsoft. I am Nicholas and I'll be your host today. In this podcast, we will dive into how effectively you can broaden your skill set to help your career. But before we get started, I want to remind you to subscribe to us on social media so you don't miss an episode and help us reach more amazing people like yourself. Today we have a special guest called Ian Schreier. Can you please introduce yourself?
Speaker 2:Sure, my name is Ian Schreier and I am an IT pro of almost 30 years in the business. My background I've got a master's in IT management coming up on 30 years in the business. My background I've got a master's in IT management coming up on 30 years in the field. I'm very much in the Microsoft skill world, as well as VMware, Cisco and others. Currently, I am a principal architect for CoreTelligent, a company based out of Boston where I do scoping estimation and project discovery for SMB and enterprise clients. On the personal side, I've started my own coaching and consulting company for careers, particularly those with IT career interests, called Help my IT Career, and I get to work with a lot of people who are looking to start an IT career, make the first big jump or even work out issues or concerns in their current career, and I'm always very pleased and blessed to be able to help people who are going to go on and do amazing things.
Speaker 1:Okay, so before we get started, I just want to ask what makes you start that help my IT career and become an IT coach?
Speaker 2:When the pandemic hit, I was laid off for a time and thankfully, I found something very quickly. But it occurred to me that I needed to be more active in planning what my next move in my career was going to be and, along with just my technical skills, I wanted to take my experience and share it with others. I did not have a always direct path to the IT field and to success in the field, and I wanted to kind of pay back the good things that were given to me the help that was given to me in my own career and help those who are also experiencing the same kind of struggles and concerns, and I'd love to help as many people as I can so they don't have to, you know, learn some of the harder lessons that I did.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all about helping another to go through which so they don't come, they don't have your challenges that you came through. So yeah very much. You can have a smooth journey. Let's talk about a little bit about your current role, so what you normally do on a day-to-day basis as a principal architect at core yeah, so core intelligent is a managed service provider based out of Boston.
Speaker 2:They do some of the things that a standard managed service provider would do day-to-day, 24-7, support for clients, doing improvement, upgrade projects as well, and helping companies get the most out of their IT investment. They also do several things around digital transformation, focusing on security, backup, recovery and disaster prevention and protection. So it really is kind of a full service, full suite firm and what I do is I take the needs that customers present to us, the requests for improvements, engagements to accomplish a particular task or project. I do deep dives into their network and their equipment, their IT resources. I work on estimating a project that will fit their budget and meet their need and I help explain, both to the customer, the account management team and the engineers who execute the project work, how the project is going to go, what direction is going to be taken and kind of what the goals and the expectations are. So I get to work with a lot of different organizations life sciences, financial non-profits it really runs the whole gamut of what kind of clients we serve.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it looks like you got a lot to learn, a lot to do, so you look like a busy, busy person. So has our team. A theme of the episode is how you broaden your skill set of your career. If someone doesn't know like that's new to their career, doesn't know what to start and what piece of advice would you advise someone to look at in order to advise? Look at the first skills in order to get started to learn about in the belt or something. Yeah, sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:IT is a very interesting field because there are multitudes of different areas you can go into, not just the traditional, say, business support efforts that you know I am a part of, my company is part of on a daily basis. There's a lot of work that can be done in development. There's a lot of work that can be done in educational technology. You know, working with educational institutions, working with organizations of just any size that have very unique or specific needs, and everybody who comes to IT has a particular set of skills and abilities that are unique to everybody.
Speaker 2:There's really not a cookie cutter approach that I would suggest. What I would tell people to do, and I've often recommended one or two. If they don't really have an understanding of what they're going to be good at yet, what they're going to enjoy in IT, I kind of suggest that they look at what they enjoy and what they're good at doing on a regular basis. Would it be working on a financial side? Is it being instructive? Helping other people in a classroom kind of environment Is enjoy, and then you kind of expand it into your choice of uh areas in the it field that you might be interested in yeah, because a lot of the time, like you won't, you won't have it like wanting, you won't know what you want to do until you have.
Speaker 1:You keep trying numerous things because, since you're really young, at that age you won't know what it is you're passionate about or a thing.
Speaker 2:You just have to keep trying and keep exploring possibility that you might like it, yeah my own experience in college I knew I was going to be in IT, but I didn't want to be a programmer. I didn't have a lot of art or design skills and I didn't want to be strictly focusing on databases or financials or things like that. But I self-trained a great deal and I found my way into a support position and business support and now the planning of needs and and helping companies make their best investment in technology uh, is kind of what I've worked on my way into okay, so I take it, you self self-learning yourself through, like certifications and like boot camp or learning, like learning platforms very much so.
Speaker 2:I got my first IT certification before the turn of the millennium and I try to keep current and aware of technologies and largely I do that through the certification process. I'm very secure in my position, I'm very comfortable, but I want to make sure that my knowledge is still relevant and I personally find that the certification process is a a good way to help validate my knowledge and make sure that I can get a framework for learning new knowledge as well yeah, that's true, because it's sometimes the certification can help you get the foot of the door and then afterwards you can just go in which direction you're passionate about when you found it.
Speaker 1:So I want to like, if someone were to get started or anything which which technical skills or with soft skills would, would you recommend someone to work on?
Speaker 2:So when I first decided I wanted to be in IT and kind of have something related to networking per se yeah, that was back when NetWare was still the biggest network interconnection system around. Of course things have changed, but I had a general interest in that and you have time to investigate and dig in. I think the best thing to do is certainly learn as much as you can about a particular thing. So say, for example, you wanted to do development. Of course there are many different areas of development front-end, back-end, ai, ml-type things. There's all kinds of different languages.
Speaker 2:I think the best thing to do is put possibilities in front of your awareness and kind of narrow them down. Say, well, I think you know I'm not really into like a lot of like web design. I don't have that much interest, but I do have an interest in say how, how backends work, how big systems work with data. And when you find these answers, you may find that you may kind of gravitate toward an area like being a DBA or a data engineer or data scientist. As far as soft skills go, the biggest recommendation I have for soft skills is to focus on emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is a very broad term so it does encompass a lot Understanding what it means to be emotionally intelligent and understand how to communicate with people, with customers, with coworkers, with management.
Speaker 1:I think that is going to be the foundation of everything else you may build uh, yeah, because sometimes like, is there any like challenges that you think young people face when trying to learn a new skills? Because I can think of one. Could be like time management depends on their needs if they have different circumstances oh sure, yeah, time.
Speaker 2:You know time management is a big one, you know, especially when you have many different interests, how do you, you know, find the best way to devote your energies?
Speaker 2:We all have only a certain amount of time and energy in the day that we can use to build our skill set.
Speaker 2:We have other commitments, we have other interests and we have to be really careful about using our energies towards something that's going to give us a positive investment in the field and the area of the field that we want. I think the most successful folks in IT are the people who really are in their kind of functional area and that's what they're really passionate about. They just kind of see him hand in glove. You may meet a person that just loves Python and wants to work with it all the time, and you can walk away from meeting that person and you might say I can really tell that they love what they do, they're really aligned with, with the technology they work with and the things they do and create, and I think those people are generally the happiest and and enjoy their career the most yeah, yeah, because my advice is that if you're trying different skills like you know, like has a hobby you can still make that as a career.
Speaker 1:Like, if you learn python, you can still become a patent developer I had a I had a uh uh uh expert.
Speaker 2:Tell me once that you should try to build a career around getting paid for something that you would do every day for free if you could. And if you look at that as kind of an idea exercise and you think, well, you know, what would I? What do I enjoy Like even in like more traditional work realms, like what part of working my job do I really get the most energy out of? I think that that's the best place for people starting their career to consider yeah, so you can.
Speaker 1:You can uh lots of people when they start the career at their head into to get experience through like internship and stuff or like mentoring and certification. Do you reckon people to just avoid university or just do apprentice or things? What's your view on that?
Speaker 2:I have had, as I said, a very unique path in my career. I got a bachelor's degree in communication, I got a graduate certificate in project management and I got a master's degree in IT management. You know, especially today, some managers or IT executives would look at me and say, I wonder why he decided to do that. He doesn't need a master's degree, he doesn't need this other stuff. And I get that and I get that. It's a very outcome-oriented path of learning and experience that we're encountering in our field.
Speaker 2:But I think part of the journey of doing a traditional degree-type program also, if you're so inclined is the ability to make a large commitment and follow through with it. That certainly looks good to employers as well. But you have to kind of find the balance. You have to first and foremost find the learning and growth situation that works for you and then kind of see what the options are for getting the knowledge that you need. There are a lot of people I know who have two-year degrees from tech schools and they've built a great career and I feel no more, no less, superior or inferior to them. We're co-workers and we're both pros on the same level and it's just very selective. It needs to match what is going to make you successful as a profession.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the only way to do it you just need to reflect on what you like and you can just learn from it. So, whatever it is, pursue it so you can make your passion your career as well. So lots of times I say that to people Whatever you're passionate about, whatever you're passionate about, what you're passionate about like, uh, coding, web design you can still made as a career. So you just need to keep trying until you find something. A lot of people doesn't know what they really want until when they hit 20s, 30s. So that's normal if you're, if you're, like that, so it's completely normal. Yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 2:You know, especially starting a career is a very challenging time.
Speaker 2:You know, we don't always have a clear picture in our mind of what we want to be doing for the next.
Speaker 2:You know 35, 40, 50 years of our, our lives and sometimes we start and stutter and find that we don't like what we're doing. Sometimes we enjoy what we're doing, but not necessarily the area or the field that it's being used for. I have a friend who is a business intelligence analyst and he is working on an opportunity for clean air and clean water initiatives in his spare time that are based around his ability to use and aggregate data with things like Power BI and things of that nature. And no matter what he does in his day job which he enjoys, he's going to be that much more excited about his passion work and someday I hope his work will will become his main focus and he'll be able to just exist and operate in something that's really going to fulfill him for a long time does you know, if people were get started in a career and want to go beyond it later on, in a few years of the career, how would you?
Speaker 1:you advise someone to like if they're shy about doing something like, for example, presentation and stuff, because it's always good to be out of your comfort zone to do something entirely new, for example, coming on like sessions like this podcast, doing live events or doing speaking at something, or it could be like at work as in, could be like at work as in. Beyond, like normally you convert so that you couldn't do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a few components to that. You know, nobody's career is perfect. There's always going to be stumbles or fails. The way I've heard it best summarized recently is failure is feedback recently is failure is feedback. If you can take your failures and you can look at the information objectively and say why did this happen to me and what can I do to make it better next time, you're going to be more resilient and you're going to be much more capable professional.
Speaker 2:No matter what you do, I would say also, in any case, whether you're wanting to change your focus, you're wanting to go in a new direction, whether you're just advocating for yourself at work. You're not sure how. I got very good advice once. I was told. You know, when you find a need, don't ever hesitate to ask for what you need in order to be successful. If that means going to management and saying, hey, I have this drive to learn something and it is related to what we do. Is there a learning platform or a book series or something, some way that I can get some help learning this, don't hesitate to ask for it. You know, is there a conference I can go to? Is there anyone you'd recommend me? Talking to ability to learn and grow as a professional. When there is a situation where a workplace or an individual or something like that is not supportive of your efforts to learn, that's generally a good sign that you should learn anyway and grow beyond what they want to set as a limitation.
Speaker 1:It's like they're saying you're in charge of your own career and not your employer. So whenever your employee doesn't have the necessary equipment or phone to help you learn something, so you can still learn it because you want to learn it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and you know, the best employees in IT or in any field, excuse me best employees in IT or in any field, excuse me best employees are those that feel engaged, are those that feel supported and those when interested, are those that know that they're going to get the ability to add new skills, new experiences and more awareness to their skill set.
Speaker 1:In order to be a better pro, always work to put yourself in the service of people who have the skills and knowledge and experience you want, and always advocate for yourself to be the best learner that you can be in order to be the best professional you can be I normally use that as a way of looking through, like role model at work or role model from the community, to see which role that you're interested, and then you can still ask them, like some guidance, how they start a career and then how, and then maybe you could get a mentor from them, something like don't be afraid to approach people, because sometimes people could actually be nice and help.
Speaker 2:You will be nice and help you by mentoring you yeah, very much so, especially, I mean, I guess it's all the times, it's every day in certain cases, but at every stop of my career I have managed to be successful, at least in no small part, due to the kindness and the understanding of people who were above me that wanted to help someone who was not yet at their level, rise to their level, and these people were intelligent enough to know that, as the saying goes, a they restrict access to information they don't want to share, they're not very forthcoming with helping or being a good coworker, and I very much. I imagine other people also thrive from people who were not like that, who were willing to share and help me grow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because one of the ways you can do that is having a plan, set goals and stuff, because you can't if you keep learning constantly, you might be burning yourself out and then you don't have time to do things that you want to do, for example, social aspect, families, things, those things. So I would say plan your day or plan your goals, what you want to do. You need to set goals monthly or weekly, just to help yourself. I would say yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:You know we all only have a certain amount of energy that gets us through the day and we have to be wise about where we spend that. You know we often have commitments for family. We often have work, of course, work commitments. We have things that we want to do personally because it energizes and enriches us. Sometimes, you know, learning is very difficult to squeeze in there and sometimes you know it has to take a backseat for a while. I would just tell anybody who is, you know, struggling with the challenges of wanting to learn and just not having the time to dedicate to it that it's okay so long as you keep it in mind and you know that you will commit to it when you can. There's no need to overwork, overexert yourself or force yourself into learning something. You'll be a better learner and a better professional when you are in a healthy, energized, supported state to be able to take in the new information.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and also don't be afraid to fail. So because you're failing is your learning opportunity is mean you have more to learn when you fail, so just don't be discouraged. I would say yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:We're all our own worst critic and it's very easy to have that mindset. You know, I I would say that a lot of culture at times can be the presentation of a perfect image or a perfect skill set. Or you know, look at all those opportunities I have because I'm so experienced and so smart, and all these things change your own path or set your own goals. You get to set the goals and focus for your life. There's no need to compare to anyone else.
Speaker 1:Your story can be just as great as theirs so I think the only thing I want to add to that is that sometimes, when you set yourself goals, I always make it measurable and make it achievable, like using the star framework, so you don't want to set something that's beyond that.
Speaker 2:You can do something that's easy and measurable so, yeah, absolutely, and that's actually, um, you know, something that we all kind of have to learn and you know, for a long time I felt in my own career, my own experience. It was not really something that was taught easily, clearly and I may share. For a moment, I do have a slide in the presentation I use on this topic and exactly what you're talking about is the ability to have smart goals, and smart goals. Actually, I'll share this one instead. Yeah, smart goals are going to be the key to having success at anything that you want to do.
Speaker 2:A smart goal is going to be specific. You've got to make a very specific focus on your goal. It can't be too broad. It's going to be measurable, so it's not going to be just like I think I'd like to learn a little about so-and-so. You want to kind of say, by this point next year, I'd like to learn you know how to do maybe X in this process of learning. It should be attainable.
Speaker 2:We definitely don't want to set a goal we're never going to be able to reach or is too far away to make us feel like we will never reach it. It's got to be relevant to not only your personal interests but sometimes say your work interests, what your skill set is, what you're trying to accomplish, and then it's got to be time bound. So it's very easy to say, oh well, I'll get around that to that sometime, maybe second half of this year. In order to be successful, it's always best to kind of set an actual goal with a desired date. You know, we may miss the date a little bit, we may beat the date a little bit, we may beat the date a little bit, but having a, an actual date in mind is going to be one way to help keep you honest and keep you working forward towards such a goal yeah, so, as this episode is coming to an end, I always like to get to know the guests.
Speaker 1:So, aside from you're working and being a career coach, what do you like to do in your spare time, ian?
Speaker 2:Sure. So I am very much a fan of all things related to music. I collect it. At one point I had about maybe 1800 CDs or so. I currently collect vinyl, which I've got about 900 of those. I've had over 10 years of professional vocal training. I'm a professional singer. I also play a little bit of guitar and bass and a very small amount of keyboard. You know, I find it very interesting, very enriching, and it's really the core of a lot of my passions. When I go on vacations, oftentimes it's to see a concert or go to a museum with something based around music or culture as a focus. So I'm very lucky to have the talent that I've been blessed with and I really try to make the most of it when I can yeah, thanks, so what are any?
Speaker 1:is there any particular advice that you recommend people to go to to look for more information on how to build a career, or just if they want to get?
Speaker 2:started. Of course, you know I I would be happy to talk to anyone who's just considering is kind of on the fence. They can definitely go to my company website, helpmyitcareercom. Reach out to me. I'm always interested in talking to and working with and helping people who are looking to make their lives and the lives of their families and eventually, the people around them, improved.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of resources out there for career information. There are a lot of very good ones. I also know that there are a lot of coaches out there who are very much wanting you to buy into a package that might include, like you know, at a high expense, like you know, things like interview prep or resume review or stuff like that. I do a lot of that myself, but I try not to focus on the sales aspect. I'd rather get to know the people. I would trust the people that are genuinely interested to see most of the sales pitches out there. But if you ever had any questions, anyone had any concerns, wanted clarity on something, I would be happy to reach out and have a conversation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great. So everyone just follow Ian if you want to learn more about his career coaching thing as well. Are you going to any other event or anything? Do you have any other things happening aside from this podcast? Are you going to anything else?
Speaker 2:Yes, next week I'll be speaking on communication capabilities to NET Meetup in Louisville. This year I've got quite a few presentations. I've got one for Orlando and, most interestingly, last year I had one for Manchester, england, and this year I've got even more scheduled for the UK Aberdeen, I believe, leeds and I just got confirmed for a presentation in Dublin later this year and I just got confirmed for a presentation in Dublin later this year.
Speaker 1:Is all those presentation soft skills or is technical as well.
Speaker 2:So very much when I present, you know, I wanted to kind of focus on my passion areas. Of course I enjoy technology very much and I can definitely speak on it. But when I consider my career and where I want to be going forward, I've had many, many tasks and opportunities and jobs based around what I can do or what I know. At this point, as I define my own career a little more, I want to kind of focus on what I can share with other people, both in and out of the IT field, and things based around career like communication styles, learning styles, how to make an effective learning plan, making an effective resumes, interview skills. Those are the things that really kind of drive my passions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you can also do it like what, what you've learned through your career as well, like whatever, to be an engineer. So soft skills helps. It's more of an experience learning, so so you, someone else, don't have to make that experience again.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, I would love to share that. I'd love I do present on that topic to a uh national non-profit location here in st louis that does grant-based it training. But I would, you know, relish any opportunity where I can help somebody. Uh, uh again, uh, get around the the things I struggled with and really go on to have a stellar career on the road.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, so thank you for coming on this episode, ian. So it's a pleasure to have you on the episode. In a few weeks it's going to be on social media and they include YouTube and Spotify, so stay tuned Bye.
