Show Notes

Ever wondered how a casino cage cashier ends up as an IT professional? Join us for this special episode of Career Downloads where host Manuel Martinez takes the hot seat to share his own tech career journey. From accidentally discovering his passion for IT to navigating the world of certifications and management roles, Manuel’s story is a rollercoaster of determination, continuous learning, and seizing opportunities.

Show Notes:

• 
  
• Introduction to the episode and Manuel’s background
  
• The pivot from architecture to IT during college years
  
• First job hunt struggles and the reality check of needing real-world experience
  
• Breaking into tech: From casino cage to help desk
  
• The value of mentorship and developing a growth mindset
  
• Leveling up: Moving through various IT roles and responsibilities
  
• The certification game: How certs boosted Manuel’s career
  
• Building a home lab and the importance of hands-on learning
  
• Transitioning to management and the surprises of being on the other side of interviews
  
• Public vs. private sector: Pros, cons, and why Manuel made the switch
  
• The importance of documentation in IT roles
  
• Knowing when it’s time to move on and seek new challenges
  
• Lessons learned and advice for aspiring IT professionals
  

Key Takeaways:

1. 
   
2. Real-world experience often trumps academic knowledge in the tech industry
   
3. Continuous learning and certifications can open doors to new opportunities
   
4. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and seek mentorship
   
5. Document your work – it’s beneficial for you and your team
   
6. Recognize when you’ve outgrown a role and be open to new challenges
   

Featured in this episode: Manuel Martinez – Host of Career Downloads and IT Professional: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelmartinez-it/

Resources mentioned:

• 
  
• A+ Certification
  
• Windows 7 Certification
  
• VMware Certified Professional (VCP)
  
• MCSA Certification
  

Get in touch:

• 
  
• Website: https://careerdownloads.com
  
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• X/Twitter https://twitter.com/@careerdownloads
  
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• FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/people/Career-Downloads/61561144531249
  

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Transcription

Hi I’m Manuel Martinez and welcome to Career Downloads. For each episode, I hit the refresh button and bring on a different guest to learn more about their background, their job history, and discover any techniques that they’ve used to be able to manage their career. This episode, unfortunately we were in the process of moving studios, so as you can see the background looks a little bit different for this one. So due to scheduling, we weren’t able to bring on a different guest. So you’re going to get to learn a little bit more about me and kind of the journey that I took along my career. So with that, I’ll go ahead and get started. So I was born and raised here in Las Vegas, Nevada. My family, my dad worked construction here for many years. So that’s kind of where I grew up and began a lot of my networking. I ended up going into UNLV with the intentions of being an architect. That was my goal. That was what I had always wanted to do since I was a kid. Once I started getting into it, I really started to learn and discover computers. Understood that it was a growing industry and pivoted from architecture over into management information systems. So in there, I took a bunch of college courses, met a good friend of mine, and we went through and finished and ended up finishing and graduating with a degree in management information systems. And like most naive college students, I thought that it would be just easy. Once I got a degree, I’d start putting in applications and everybody was just going to want to hire me because I have a degree who wouldn’t want to. I quickly discovered that while a degree is nice to have, I needed to have real-world experience. That’s what people were looking for. I didn’t, in the process of attending college, decided to, I didn’t even know that it was possible to try and get internships, again, to try and develop some of that experience. So I went through, graduated, and after not being able to land a job for probably about a good month, I ended up going and working for my dad in his masonry company. So I did that for quite a few months, still putting in applications, word of mouth, just trying to talk to different people to find out and see if there were any openings and see if I could find anybody that would want to hire me. That didn’t pan out. So at some point, the frequency of which I was putting in job applications started to slow down, started talking to my dad and trying to learn the business, thinking that maybe my career path was going to lead me towards going and really taking over the family business. Well, in some of those discussions, one of my best friends that I had known since junior high school, he was working at a, one of the local casinos here, and he reached out to me knowing that, you know, we talked all the time. He knew that I was struggling to get a job. So he actually put me in contact with someone that he had known for a couple of years in the casino that he was working for. And she talked to him, basically told me to come in for an interview as a casino cage cashier. So the person that, you know, when you get a bunch of chips or when you would get your, you know, your slot ticket out of the slot machines, you know, you’d come and cash it in. I was the person counting out the bills for you or if you needed to break a hundred, that was what I was doing. She hired me on and basically said that she would help me. She was pretty good friends with the person that was in charge of the help desk. And what she had said was, if I worked for her, saw that I had a good work ethic, did a good job. What she would do is we could put in for an internal transfer after six months and then be able to go in and move over to the help desk. So she would work to help me get that interview and be able to put in the internal transfer. So I thought, well, I’d be inside air conditioning. All I’d have to do is just stand around and cash out, you know, talk to people. So I figured it’s a lot better than being outside in the 110 degree heat carrying cinder blocks around all day. I had to go through and move forward with that. And I did the cage cashier for actually eight months. So after my six months, true to her words, she went in and put in the help me put in the internal transfer. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a position open, but it only took an additional two months for that opening to happen. I had done my interview, things went well, and eventually I transferred over and started at the help desk for one of the local casinos here in town. So at the help desk, they actually had a number of properties not only here locally, but they had a number outside of Las Vegas as well. So I did help desk. I was on I was doing training there during the day shift. So the actual opening that they had was for the graveyard shift. So I came in, did my training during the day, and then got shipped off to the night shift working midnight to 8am. So I did that. And most of the time what you’re doing is you’re answering phones, right? So help desk for me was just answering phones. People had problems. Hey, I don’t know my password, you’re doing password resets, helping them do basic PC troubleshooting. One of the other things that we had to do also is the office where we were at was actually not on property at a casino, but it was actually right behind it. One of the responsibilities was to do the nightly tape backups. So as part of that process, you’d have to walk over at a certain time, switch over tapes at what used to be the old Stardust casino before it got imploded, and change out the tape backups, and then head on back over to man the phones. So I did that for quite a while. And while it was good to learn and be able to troubleshoot, it’s one thing to troubleshoot when you’ve got something right in front of you and you can test things out, but be able to walk through, walk somebody through the process of fixing their computer without being able to actually see. So this is right around the time there was starting to be some remote management tools, but most of what we were doing, some of those might be like AS 400 terminals where there is no way to remote in. So you just kind of had to walk somebody through that. So that was pretty interesting. I was only there at the help desk for a few months, and then a position became open for what’s called a computer operator, still within kind of the help desk realm. And that was on the day shift. And I quickly jumped on it and said, I’ll take it. It was basically doing a lot of management for the AS 400 systems, really didn’t know anything about the AS 400, having to answer messages, things of that nature. And I probably did that still for about, I want to say probably close to another good four months, so all in all, I probably spent between the help desk and being a computer operator somewhere around, I want to say probably close to a year. And one of the things that I really kind of learned and decided there is that I did not enjoy being on the phone all day and just basically just that repetitive. I enjoyed talking to the people, it’s great helping them with their problems, but just doing that eight hours a day every day was just not for me. So I kind of started networking there within the business, talking to other people and finding out what other positions were available and found out that there were PC technicians. So started talking to the manager, asking him what were some of the things that a PC technician needed in order to kind of be able to jump into that role. And some of the skills that I had learned on the help desk, a lot of troubleshooting, here you’re actually the one doing the fixing. So one of the other things that we did at the help desk is if we couldn’t fix the problem remotely, we would cut a ticket and those would go off to the PC technicians, sometimes they’d go to the server admins and network admins. So you’re getting the ticket that’s coming in and fixing that issue because maybe it was something like a physical hardware problem where it couldn’t be resolved over the phone. There were probably three of us at that time that were looking to get in and jump into that role. So one of the things that I decided and I kind of asked the network manager or sorry, the PC technician manager was again what kind of skills, what would be something good to have and he mentioned the A+. So I went and bought an A+ certification book, started reading through it. My intention was to go through and take the certification so I could have that. A position actually opened up before that time came to be, before I actually ended up scheduling the exam. But I had learned enough with all my studying to be able to go through and perform well on the interview. I was able to answer all those questions, spending that time on the help desk. I was able to kind of answer how I would help and interact with people in person. And the PC or sorry, the technician manager actually spoke with the help desk manager to see what kind of feedback she was getting from the people that I was helping, right? Were there a lot of complaints? What was I like to work with? So it wasn’t just what are my technical skills, but also what are my personal skills? So that worked out well. I ended up getting the position as a PC tech and one of the first, as part of that transition, I ended up traveling and going out to Louisiana. So there was a new casino that they had just purchased from somebody else and it was part of the transition. So it was a lot of hands on deck. So while I had a lot of book knowledge, a little bit of troubleshooting from messing with my own PC that I had built at home, I was really thrown into the fire. And I spent a little bit of time shadowing some of the PC technicians that had been there for a while that actually went and traveled as well. It was a lot of re-imaging machines, trying to find out which ones we could kind of convert over to the new system without having to re-image them. So it was just a lot. I was able to, in that one week of the system transition, I was able to learn quite a bit. Kind of fast forward, went back and did PC technician for a while. And the person that I was paired up with to kind of learn, I really credit him a lot for kind of the outlook or the mentality that I had moving forward throughout my career. The reason for that is he made me feel very comfortable and actually encouraged me to speak up and be honest. If I didn’t know something, like if he asked me, hey, do you know how to do this? He said, if you don’t know, it’s okay, it’s fine, I can teach you. But if you tell me you know how to do it, then I’ll just send you off and do it. But if you’re not, I’ll go through and I’ll teach you. He was don’t ever lie or try and feel that you have to impress me by saying that you know how to do everything. So I’ve used that really throughout my career. At no point did I ever think to myself like, oh man, I’m in a position where I don’t think I can do the job. I think probably the exact opposite. So just kind of my upbringing, you know, a lot of things that my dad had taught me and then also this, we’ll call my mentor just made me feel like there’s nothing that I can’t do. Now, I may not know it, but that doesn’t mean I can’t and won’t figure it out. So you know, a lot of things, and I think I’ve touched on it in a couple of different episodes, you know, one of the things he asked me was like, hey, have you ever toned out a network port, you know, and patched that in? I was like, nope, absolutely not. I’ve never even seen a toning device. I have no idea what you’re talking about. So again, he would go through and show me and I picked up a lot of skills, you know, at some point while, you know, he was teaching me a lot, he can’t teach you everything. So there’s a lot of items where, you know, a ticket would come in. I was like, hey, I think I’ve got this, or I think I can figure this out. Let me give it a try. As long as it wasn’t critical, somewhere, you know, part of the casino floor is down. I would go through and just struggle for a little bit. If I couldn’t figure it out, sometimes I would call him there from the desk and say, hey, you know, I’ve tried this and this, here’s the problem. Sometimes he would walk me through it, otherwise sometimes just talking through it with him. I’ve noticed that that’s a theme throughout my career, sometimes just talking out loud, kind of working through the problem with somebody else helps you, has helped me at least figure out what the issue is. So that was great. I did that for quite a while, was really enjoying being a PC technician. But in mind that I had gone to college with, he actually had gotten a role at one point and he was actually working for a different casino, a different property. We got to talking and we started talking about salary. When I started at the help desk, I was probably making somewhere like $25,000 a year as I moved my way up through those other two roles. I think as a PC technician, I was probably making somewhere around $35,000, maybe $40,000 a year. I think it was probably a $35,000, about $35,000, I was talking to him. He was telling me what he did as a PC technician for this other casino properties and basically making about $10,000 more than I was. So he was making about $45,000 and I thought to myself, wait a minute, we’re doing the exact same job and you’re making $10,000 more than me? Again, no difference, still working for a casino, still working on the AS400 PCs, point of sale systems. So I decided that, you know what, why don’t I go and try and move over to that other property? He put in a good word for me, put me in as a recommendation and that’s exactly what I did. I went through and put in an application to be a PC technician for this other casino property and eventually I ended up getting the position. So I did that for quite a few years. I started for about almost a year and a half as a PC technician. Once I got in there, I started to kind of dabble a little bit more in different areas. Started making connections with the network team on the server team so there wasn’t like really dedicated server admins that were, but I think there’s one or two that didn’t look like they would be going anywhere, but networking, again, casinos, they were expanding so this was Coast Casinos at the time, they’re kind of no longer around, but Coast Casinos, they were starting to deploy new properties, networking is growing, so I thought, hey, you know what, networking might be something fun and interesting to learn. I walked around, got to take a couple days, as long as it wasn’t too busy, they gave me the freedom to go through and be able to kind of shadow the network people and I would walk around with them for, you know, most of the day, you know, see the switches they were configuring when they go into routers, you know, patching network closets and while it was fun and interesting and I did learn a lot, decided that that’s not really something that I wanted to do, just networking didn’t seem all that interesting to me. Once you kind of set up the network and got it running, it just worked, the only time is if there was some sort of an outage or a problem. So then I, again, still making contacts, one of the things I talked to is there was a team that handled the databases for the casino slot floor systems. So I was like, oh, sounds interesting, I don’t know much about databases other than, you know, kind of what they were used for. So I got in, started talking to them, again, just networking with people and just being friendly, asking questions and I ended up, there was an opening because they were expanding and I got in as a database admin, running a lot of SQL queries, trying to pull information about the casino slot floor systems and that was fun for a while. Around that same time, my buddy had gotten me the job there at Coast Casinos, he ended up leaving and he went into the private sector. I decided I’m still going to stick around, or sorry, he went into the public sector, figured I kind of like it in the private sector, I’m going to stick around here for a little bit. Shortly around that time, there were reports in the news and we had heard it internally as well that Boyd Gaming, which was the company, the gaming company that I started my career with, that they were going to be purchasing Coast Casinos and I had kind of jumped ship from Boyd and went over to Coast when I did that, still kept in contact with a lot of my peers, they were kind of giving me a hard time, you know, like, hey, oh man, you know, you left us, but you’re going to come back and work for us, you know, just wait, now you’re going to go back to the bottom of the totem pole, you know, it was just all in good fun, but it did give me thinking like, wait a minute, I left them once already and I’m going to go back, I just didn’t think that that was going to be a situation that would really be good for me in the long run. So at that time, I started putting in applications, like I said, my friend had decided to go off into the public sector and decided I would give that a try. So I started putting in some applications there for different agencies, especially after what he had talked to me and told me about, you know, some of the perks, you know, the retirement system, you know, the hours, it’s not like at the casino where 24 seven, when I was working as the, what one of the database admins, you know, there was only three of us at the time with a rotating on call, and that’s 24 seven. Sometimes, you know, people wouldn’t remember, they didn’t know if we didn’t update our calendar that maybe I wasn’t on call and I’d get called anyway, and that quickly got a little old for me. He was telling me, you know, in the government, there’s no, there’s no on call. If we do have to do something, you know, the agency he worked for, he’s like, it’s after hours, he was like, it’s time and a half. Just everything sounded good to me. And I believe the pay was comparable. They kind of made up for it in that you get paid holidays, you know, your set hours, things like that. So I said, well, you know what kept putting in my applications. And eventually I did get a call for an interview with the Division of Welfare and Supportive Services. So I ended up taking a position there. And the position was just a IT professional, no, it was IT technician is what the position was. And they had different levels. I don’t remember what level I came in as, but as the technician, it was still a lot of kind of what I was doing prior, more PC tech than kind of like database admin. We did have a couple servers. The way that they were structured is down here in Las Vegas, they were a bunch of remote satellites, the main office and the main set of servers were located up in Carson City, right up in the capital. So that was interesting. You know, there’d be a couple of little servers there on site doing a lot of PC work and out while we had our office. I did spend a lot of time going out to again, these satellite offices. And we call them satellite offices just because they weren’t where the main office was. And trying to think around that time, I mean, some of these offices are pretty large. You know, there were some smaller ones depending on the number of employees or based on their location. But I spent a lot of time just doing a lot of PC refreshes, a lot of repairs. So you know, we would show up to the main office, same thing, look at a ticketing system. And then in that ticketing system, you would see, you know, what, what were the issues? We would try and go through. There was a group of, I want to say there’s probably about five or six of us working. And we would go through, look at the tickets and some, some people like to just stay and do all the tickets just there, anything they could fix while at their desk. Some, I remember some of the people that I worked with there, they prefer to do a lot of the ones where it required, you know, required us to actually leave and go on site. And we would have to kind of plan it out. So we would look at all the tickets that were in the queue and try to determine if someone was going to low, someone was going to go because we only had a single vehicle. We kind of had to plan it out, like, okay, what are critical issues? Hey, the critical issue is that this office, we have these two that, you know, these two machines that really have to get up and running, or maybe there’s a problem with the small little server that we had there in that office. And basically plan it out, okay, today we’re going to be able to hit based on the number of issues, based on the location of the issues right at the different offices. Hey, we’re going to hit these two or three offices and hit the machines there. Sometimes it’d be one person going, excuse me, sometimes it might be two people going. If there’s two people, then we would try and kind of divvy up the number of tickets. And you know, I enjoy doing that, learned a little bit of everything. So they were a Novell shop. So I got to kind of learn Novell and how that worked. And right around that time is when VMware started to become a thing. We got copies of VMware Workstation. And one of the things is for Novell is we had to package applications. So it was really nice as we had VMware Workstation. So what we could do is we leverage snapshots for that. So we would build these VMs, have, you know, basically a clean image, or we would have an image that had certain requirements on there for certain applications, and then we would kind of snapshot it. And the nice thing was is then we could go through and install, you know, whatever application we needed to deploy. So what we were doing is basically capturing all the changes, packaging all that up and then being able to send that to remote PCs or remote clients to deliver software. So I really got fascinated with the technology, really learned how to use it, became very efficient with just Workstation, snapshotting, managing, you know, the different snapshots, the different images, and really took that on as kind of my project. So I started traveling to the remote sites a little bit less, and really just managing package deployments. Occasionally, of course, you know, there were still times where I had to travel and go out. But I use that, that knowledge and thinking that it was just Workstation. And that’s how all virtual machines worked. Right at this time, I didn’t really, I started to read about it, but I didn’t really understand vMotion. Right, I was just like, Oh, this is cool. Snapshots to me were the coolest things. Oh, you know, instead of me having to use a machine, capture it, you know, this installation package, and then basically wipe it and start all over with installing the OS again, I could just roll back in a matter of seconds. And all the changes I made were gone. I mean, that to me was just, it was mind blowing. So, did that for a little while, and my friend that had gotten me into Coast Casinos, he was working for a different government agency, and they were going to have an opening. He asked if I would be interested in moving over. That position was, like I said, I was a PC technician over here. That one was for an IT Professional. It was the way the government works is they have different pay scales based on job functions. So an IT Professional was kind of a couple job functions or job roles above where I was currently at. And it was a bump in pay, which I was happy for, especially because at that time, while I was working at, while I was currently working for the welfare, I ended up meeting my wife there. So I got married, we were thinking about, you know, starting a family. So I was like, well, more money would be a good thing, right, especially as we’re trying to kind of save up and, you know, start our family and moved on over to working for a different government agency, making a little bit more money. And the other thing that was nice is they were just going through, they had installed VMware and they were on VMware 3.0. And I got there right at the perfect time because they were doing an upgrade from ESX. So at the time it was ESX not ESXi, it was ESX 3.0 to 3.5. And I think it’s part of the 3.5. They were actually going from ESX to ESXi, which, you know, they weren’t quite compatible. They were a little bit different, but I got to go through and understand that process. So I guess if I kind of go back, though, one of the nice things was, again, I mentioned a buddy of mine, my friend there, he did help me prep a little bit for the interview, made me understand kind of what they were looking for, what some of the skill sets that would be needed for at that position. And before the position actually opened, one of the other nice things was government moves, government moves a little slow. So to be able to kind of stand out from the other candidates, buddy of mine said that I should start looking at trying to get a couple of Window certifications because they were a big Window shop. And I thought, oh, I’ll do kind of like I did with the A+ , right? I’ll study for the exam just to be able to know, you know, I thought I knew Windows pretty well, figured, you know, why do I really need to learn this? He mentioned that he had seen in the past, and even when he applied that there were number of candidates, again, to kind of be able to go through and pass the screening process, they were looking for certifications. So he was like, just get at least one. And that thing at the time, it was like a Windows 7 certification. So being a PC technician, I knew I’d be able to pass that as opposed to some of like the Windows Server ones, because that wasn’t something that I had dealt with much in my career. So I started studying a little bit and started doing some research on the Windows 7 certifications. And one of the things that they mentioned is, you know, there’s multiple ways to do something in Windows, but the certification exam really tests your knowledge to know if you know how to do it, the Microsoft way. So I just remember that, like making sure you knew how to do it, the Microsoft way. I went through and I remember how long I studied for, but I studied for a little while, basically long enough to where I was able to pass the Windows 7 certification and get that certificate so that when I put in my application for the, it wasn’t necessarily a transfer, because they were, again, they were different state agencies, but they were still with the state. So I did kind of, they would give preference as opposed to an external candidate. And he was right, you know, having that Windows 7 certification really did help kind of set me apart from the other candidates. And some of the questions that they asked me were very, were questions that I probably would not have been able to answer as quickly had I not gone through the process of studying for that certification exam. So I went through, did my interview, and that was probably the first time that I actually had to go through and sit on a panel interview. So there was actually three different people that sat down and interviewed me. Different, you know, it was the manager, I think the director, and then they had actually had a, don’t remember what her title was, but she was somebody high up like a director level, but outside of IT. Went through, you know, I had three different people asking me questions, so a combination of technical questions, personality questions. And really, I just did my best to answer as quickly and as honestly and as correctly as I could. There were a couple questions where, you know, I just, I made sure that I kind of really went back to the basics and making sure like, can I go through and explain my answer in a way that makes sense, and that is correct. So I think that’s one of the big things that, I think a lot of us, there are a lot of people when they’re first starting out, they don’t, you know, when you’re answering questions, it’s nice to kind of use the big words and all the technical jargon, but really making sure that you understand the technology at its very basic level. You know, like if someone asks you, you know, what is DHCP and how does it work? You know, it’s one thing to just kind of go through and say, oh, DHCP, that’s what gives IP addresses and, you know, they change all the time, so once you connect, you just get one. Yeah, kind of, I guess that’s how it works, but really understanding, you know, what is that process of, you know, hey, I plug in, you know, you send, you receive the acknowledgement like the entire step-by-step process, really understanding that to be able to answer questions, especially if anything that you kind of put on your resume, I think that’s one of the things that people may not be aware of is that’s fair game. If it’s on your resume when it comes to asking questions, if you say that, you know, you know how to use DNS, DHCP, you are, you know, a network person and you know all these technologies, then, and protocols, person on the other end, you know, you’ve put it on there, you say that, hey, I can do this, I know how, I understand it, but yet when you get into an interview and they ask you about it, you’re either not confident, you can’t explain it correctly, and I understand sometimes people get nervous, but there’s a difference between being nervous and really not understanding the technology and getting nervous because, you know, you’re trying to BS your way through it. So that’s one of the things that, at least at that level, you know, going forward, what I thought was like the professional level, it’s no longer, you know, hey, help to ask for a PC technician where there’s a ton of them, you know, as you’re starting to move up, there’s less and less of these positions. So I did really well on the interview, was made an offer and, you know, moved over to this other agency, and again, got to learn a lot about VMware and a lot about Windows servers. So at the time it was Windows Server 2003, so I dealt a little bit with before, but now I was in that position, anything from the switch all the way to, you know, the end device is something that we were in charge of. So and even at the switch level, like we had the ability to go through and make configuration changes on the switches. Now there was another agency that managed all of the WAN, right? So they’re, you know, kind of from the router on down, I’m sorry, from the router up they managed but everything else we had to manage. So it was a good learning experience, it built me a good foundation, you know, started dealing more with backups, tapes, servers, switches, you know, doing a lot of cable runs. So that was probably one of the places where I mentioned that my first PC job, like I had done toning and that was fine to be able to go through and do a tone, but if it didn’t work or there wasn’t actually a network jack there, we would kind of take it over to the network team and they were the ones in charge of, you know, running those cables. It was a little bit different, again, because we managed all of that if there was a kind of an office that was being built and a jack need to be run. If it was a one off, a lot of times we would have to do that, you know, we’d have to run the conduit, run the, you know, at the time it was Cat5, so we’d be running the Cat5 cables, terminate them, test them, tone them, that whole process. So again, really, from the switch on down, we managed everything. And like I said, it was very enjoyable, I learned a lot and that’s around the time when I really started to get serious with certifications and really just to demonstrate that I had that knowledge and at some point I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after, you know, leaving that agency, you know, I don’t know if it’s move up to another agency, you know, maybe another position within there, kind of move up in the ranks, but I thought, you know what, it’s probably a good idea for me to start getting certifications, start demonstrating that I have the knowledge, you know, the technical knowledge and really be able to kind of screen, you know, pass the screenings for a lot of these positions that I wanted to interview for and try to get because when I would go through and look at some of the requirements, you know, I would see things like, you know, MCSE, MCSA, again, VMware had just come out, so VCPs were starting to kind of become a thing. So I started going through and, you know, I had a friend of mine and we would go through and like we would study together. Hey, let’s go take the, let’s get our MCSA. All right. Hey, what exams do we need? Which ones do we think we want to try and knock out first? And, you know, we’d buy the books, watch videos and really start watching them studying. Sometimes we would get together and just kind of quiz each other. And it was also nice to be able to have somebody just bounce questions off of like, Hey, I’m reading this. This is what it says. Or I watched this video. Can you help explain or, you know, just kind of be able to have that person to go through and, you know, just study with, right? Someone to keep me accountable. So that was, I would say, very helpful. So if you have somebody, even if you don’t have a study partner, you know, some people just they can’t study with somebody else. I know there’s times depending on the material, I feel a lot better if I’m studying on my own, especially now, now that I’ve kind of been doing this a little bit longer, and I understand it more like I do reach out to people and ask questions, but I don’t necessarily go through and, you know, can sit and study with someone else. So having someone that kept me accountable and say, Hey, we’re, we’re going to go for the MCSA. All right, let’s do it. And kind of me, you know, I always played sports, you know, as a kid in high, you know, all the way up through high school, a little bit in college. And that keeping accountable that that competition, like, Oh, we’re going to do an MCSA. All right, well, let’s do it. Right. Okay. If I have somebody that I would wasn’t necessarily competing with them, but it kind of drove me to say, Oh, they’re going to do it. I’ve got to do it. So I’ve got to, it would push me to work harder to do and get the certification for myself, but also to kind of go through and say, Hey, all right, well, I passed this. Did you? No. And it wasn’t never, it was never mean hearted. You know, I’d be like, Hey, I pass it, you know, and if they didn’t like, Okay, Hey, you know, do you know what area you missed in? And, you know, let’s go through and maybe I can help you out in, in that area. And there’s a couple of times where I didn’t pass, right? There’s no, I didn’t pass every certification exam the first time every time. And then going through and saying, Hey, I didn’t pass this one. Here’s the area where it says I scored low, you know, and maybe they scored extremely high in there. All right, well, help me understand some of these concepts or some of this terminology. And then I got sent over to do at one point a VMware Certified Professional or the VCP bootcamp. So that was probably the only certification I knew of at the time where you actually had to sit through a course in order to well, you could take the exam without it, but you wouldn’t get their certification unless you both took and passed the exam. And you had to sit through their through their course. And at the time, it was a week long boot course, a week long bootcamp course. I did that with the another coworker. We were actually out in LA for that. So it was nice. Got to, you know, kind of hang out with the coworker who actually happened to be from up north, Northern Nevada. We went and a lot of the technology and concepts that they were talking about, we had already been doing for a while. So it was a lot of the topics weren’t really things that were covered in the certification was weird. You know, they make you sit through this mandatory class, but the very the class was very basic. And the fact that it was like, Hey, this is how you create a virtual machine. This is how you create a network. But when you took the exam, they were going on, you know, they were asking about concepts that were a little bit more advanced than that. But anyway, this still went through, took the course, studied for a little while and ended up passing that. And at the time that was for version four, so my VCP4 I quickly around the time that I got that certification, I was taking old equipment, a lot of old servers and building I was building labs there at work. At some point, right, like, you know, once we work together. So my buddy and I who were there together, we it took us, you know, took us probably almost two years. But during that time, we really got that place really streamlined. It was to the point where we didn’t have many issues. You know, all our images were very clean. You know, the times that we did have a problem, it was usually a hardware failure, where we’re having to either replace a full machine, you know, keyboard, a mouse, outside of that, there wasn’t really a lot of work going on. Active directory, we had kind of cleaned up all that group policies. Again, we got very good at cleaning up the environment and making it very efficient. Same thing with our VMware environment, you know, that was running smoothly. One of the nice things now is if we had to do any maintenance on any of that hardware, you know, being able to vMotion, right, and be able to move one server one VM from one piece of hardware over to another one to be able to do maintenance work that in the past had to be done after hours. Now we’re able to do a lot of this during the day. That was something that was, again, it was unheard of prior to that. I, like I mentioned, I started setting up a lab equipment and that’s probably the first time where I had like a work, you know, I call it a home lab, but it was only accessible, you know, at work. I could set up VPN, you know, to kind of remote in, but it wasn’t the same as actually having the gear there where you could kind of console in. A couple of times, I did remote in with trying, you know, after hours and play with it. Problem was, if I made a change or something didn’t work correctly, and I actually, you know, let’s say they powered off one of those servers, there was no way for me to turn it back on. So now I was, you know, sitting there and I’d have to wait till the next day, power it back on and then hopefully remember what I was doing, you know, that night before, you know, testing out whatever it was I was working on. I was able to gain, again, quite a bit of additional knowledge because I was able to kind of break that environment repeatedly without causing an issue to production. And it really helped me understand how VMware worked, how the standard switches, the distributed switches, you know, really understand it because I could play with it like, okay, I read this, I watched this video, I understand how it works, I mapped it out, but it’s not the same thing as, you know, without actually going through and manually doing it and saying, okay, well, this is how it works. What if I do this? What happens? Oh, this breaks or, hey, this doesn’t break, but I don’t see the reaction to my action. So that was probably around the time where I started to have probably the biggest growth in my career. It was around that time, because again, I have the ability to now go through and just play around with all kinds of equipment. So I did that for a while, even our upgrades. So when we upgraded from version four to version five, I did that in my lab environment first, tested it out. You know, it required still at the time an external SQL server, you know, making sure that we set those up correctly, just going through that process over and over and documenting it. Because that was one of the things I learned is I would go through, figure out how to get everything working. And if I went through and blew it out and tried to do it again, I didn’t have anything documented and quickly learned that I didn’t remember everything just because I did it once didn’t mean I remembered exactly how to do everything, all the steps that were involved as part of that upgrade process. So quickly learned that, hey, I probably should start documenting, you know, certain settings and in document the entire process, I would just kind of take shorthand notes like, hey, you know, do this, and then do that. And here, these are specific notes. Because if you don’t do this, even though the instructions say, you know, it doesn’t matter what it was that they said, if you don’t follow these additional steps, or if you don’t do this thing that’s not listed as a prerequisite, the installation will fail or the upgrade will fail. So really starting to kind of go through and take those kinds of notes, make those kinds of changes. And understand like, oh, this is important for me, because, you know, maybe I may not do this again, or I can hand this off when somebody does they’re upgraded a different office or when, you know, they’re doing it up in Northern Nevada, right, making sure that we’re on the same version, we’re following the same process. Instead of having to sit through and kind of walk somebody through it and say, well, I think this is what I did. Pretty sure I had to do, you know, A, B and C before I did F, you know, that was really something that if you’re not doing it now, really develop a habit and a process of documenting what you’re doing, what you’re working on, and the steps you took to do that. It’s definitely very beneficial. You never know when, you know, you might have to hand it off to somebody, and it becomes very helpful for them. The other thing is there might be a time where you might have to revert back to that, you know, and it’s a good reference to have. At one point, though, after I kind of documented it, got it through and did the upgrade, I kept blowing out my labs, trying different things, but really, there’s only so much you can do with a lab environment. At least for me, at some point, I started to get bored, right, like, I can only, you know, come up with different scenarios on my own for so many things. So then eventually, I think around that time, I decided that public sector really moved a little bit too slow for me, right? Sure, there was an upgrade. It seemed like when I first got there, maybe because the technology was new to me, all the things that they were doing, there was a lot of learning, a lot of growth happening for me. But once we had, once I had kind of gotten past that hurdle, and I was now building in a lot of efficiencies, doing a cleanup, it quickly got very boring for me and decided that, you know what, I think I might want to try and go, wasn’t sure if I wanted to go back to private sector or not, but really, I thought it was time for me to kind of leave that role and find something else. I started putting in a number of applications, started talking to different people just to kind of try and see, put feelers out, understand what was out there. And I think I’m pretty sure around that time, I had applied at a Switch data center. So thinking that maybe that might be something that I’d want to do. And when word got around, you know, again, through different contacts that I was looking at moving and leaving the current position that I was at, I was informed about a role working for the local college, one of the local colleges here in Las Vegas. They were looking for a server manager. And when I first heard about it, I really wasn’t too sure. I didn’t know that I really wanted to go into management, talk to a friend of mine and who had gone into that management role and that just seemed to be a lot of headaches. And he liked a lot of the technical hands on knowledge, you know, a lot of that that type of work. So I went in interviewed for it. Again, there was a contact, they knew the director that was hiring for the position. I figured, you know, it can’t hurt to interview if nothing else, I’ll get the experience kind of understand what’s required for a management role. The good thing, at least for me personally, was this role was a lot more hands on than it was management. So when I came in, they said it would probably be about 80 to 90% hands on 10 to 20% management. There was only, I want to say two or three people that I would be managing. So it’d be a good, you know, would be too overwhelming for me to come in as a manager and, you know, having to manage a big team of like 10 or 15 people. So there’s three people there. And again, they said it was mainly hands on. A lot of the questions that I was being asked were more at the technical level, because they needed somebody, they wanted this position, the way it was kind of explained to me, it would be more of like a technical lead. So it was more of a technical lead position, rather than, you know, a manager. And then, you know, everything sounded good, they were doing, they had a big VMware environment, a lot of backups, a large storage array network that was used there. So a big SAN that was used, and I had dealt with one at the public sector. So when I was working there, it was on a very small scale is just connected to, you know, the three or four ESXI hosts that we had there. This one was a much larger environment. One of the things, you know, as I came on, one of the projects was going to be to migrate all of that, you know, clean it up. And then, at some point, they were going to be replacing that. I want to say it was like an EMC, Clarion, I think we were going to go, they were going to move over to the VNX model. So that was one of the projects, there was a project for just a couple other projects that they had going on where they just needed to kind of a technical lead to take on and, you know, figure out what the roadmap was, how it was all going to work. It was up to me whether I wanted to do a lot of that hands on work, or delegate a lot of it out. So I worked with the team that I had great group of guys, I’m still in contact with them now, have good relationships with them. The goal, originally when I came on, they were just going to be starting again, some of these projects, a lot of the server stuff, a lot of cleanup, some standardization. So like most environments, as a lot of people kind of go through, you start to get everybody puts their hand in it. So you don’t see a lot of consistency, one person does it one way, they start to do that, somebody else will come in and, you know, they’ll do it their way. And they may not necessarily set everything up that way. So you kind of get a mix and mash of different, you know, configurations and setups. So really no standardization. And I really enjoyed working there. At some point, we did end up having to hire for another position. And that was the first time I got a taste of understanding what it’s like to be on the other side of the table. So, you know, it’s one thing when you’re the interviewee, but being the actual interviewer, it’s very different, right? A lot of, I don’t say a lot of preparation, but there is some preparation that goes into it. So when I was sitting in on these, you really have to have an idea of what it is you’re looking for in the candidate. We spent a number of time going through and just looking at resumes and screening people out based on qualifications or what was on the resume. And even just sometimes how the resume was formatted, right? I mean, you would start to try and read it. And if it was just too much of a pain, and I do have an episode where we have a technical recruiter that talks about a lot of that, they don’t spend a lot of time kind of reading through it. If it just looks like a jumbled mess, they would kind of chuck it to the side, then I would see that. So really making sure that as we’re going through and screening these, that we’re getting the right number of candidates. And then you had to go through and schedule them and say, okay, we’re going to bring in X number of candidates. These are the days that we’re going to schedule them. And we would do the same thing, the panel interview. Part of the reason now, and I understand why they do the panel interview, is you want to get a diverse perspective, right? You want to make sure as you’re going through and you’re hiring people that you’re, that you’re not being biased and saying, hey, well, this person, I just really like them, and I’m going to hire them. And maybe, you know, if somebody else had interviewed them, they would say no. So we would do panels of at least three people and then talk about it afterward. And, you know, we would try and talk about, hey, these are the types of questions that we’re going to ask based on the resume. Hey, you know, you’re, you’re really strong in this area. You should ask them some of these questions. But at some point, you just kind of start recycling questions and I would steal from somebody else and they would steal some of my questions. And really going through and understanding when you’re asking a question, why are you asking it, right? So don’t just ask a, an interviewee, a specific question just to ask it. There really should be some thought behind it. So that was very interesting, very new. Luckily, the other people that I was on the panel with, they had actually done the interviews before. So I did feel a little nervous at first. You know, I almost felt like I was the interviewee being the first time that, that I had actually interviewed somebody else for a position. And it, it was a process, you know, I didn’t realize how long and how difficult it might be to fill a position. A number of things could go wrong, right? Like, during the interview, you might realize that, you know, this things that this person put on the resume, they don’t know it, even though they put it on there and said that they did. There’d be times where just professionalism, you know, you know, how many people that we turned down because they didn’t show up on time. They weren’t dressed appropriately or professional for the interview. Just any number of things that, you know, quickly candidates start to kind of disqualify themselves. I won’t say that we were disqualified. They were just kind of disqualifying themselves. So again, just making sure that we were finding the right person. And it’s come up before, right? Sometimes you would get that person that’s super technical. They could answer all those questions. But when we start to ask them personality questions and just try to get a little bit more about them, you just got that feeling that I don’t know if this is somebody that I could work with or just the way that they answered questions. Because while they were, they would be on the server team, they would have to interface with other IT departments. There’s a possibility that you might even interact with some of the people that work at the college, right, that are outside of IT. And we didn’t want to place somebody that we felt wouldn’t be able to represent our department the best way possible. So really, that was very interesting, very eye-opening. I enjoyed it. And it did help me become a better interviewee. So when I went through and now when I interviewed for positions, I understood what it was like to be on the other side for the person behind the desk. So when they’re asking me the questions, making sure that I’m very intentional with my answers. If I didn’t understand or if I needed to kind of buy time, you know, just have them repeat the question or maybe I would rephrase it to make sure that I understood what it is that they’re asking. Because maybe sometimes that the person that’s asking you that question, it’s come up before, right? They might just be making it up right there, you know, just trying to ask a question based on a problem that they’re having, or they just answer, they ask the question in a way that maybe it’s not clear to you. So really understanding that it’s okay to go through and say, I just want to make sure that this is what you’re asking or rephrasing. Okay, so what you’re asking is, you know, blah, blah, blah, right, making sure that you understand what they’re asking so that when you give an answer, the answer is appropriate, is an appropriate response to that. Again, in that role there, had a great team, again, built good relationships. One of, I mentioned that one of the people that I was managing there was, you know, to this day, I still consider a good friend of mine. So I did that position there for a while, still worked on getting a couple additional certifications, really learn more about storage networks. So that was something that was very interesting to me, again, planning out the, that migration process over to the new storage array. That was something that was very fun. I’ve had to do that actually a couple of times in my career, managing the storage switches, you know, being able to mask the different WWNs for, you know, for the devices, for the servers that are connecting to them. And really understanding, you know, some of these, especially on the newer systems at the time, they had tiering, like tiering structures, right? So you had like your RAID 10 that, you know, would come in right fast. And then, you know, if that data wasn’t touched within, you know, a certain amount of time that it would drop down to your slower tiers, and then eventually it would tear down all the way to your slower 7,200 RPM drives that probably hadn’t been touched in over a year, right? So you want to use your faster, more expensive drives for data that needs to be accessed frequently, and, you know, you want to make sure that it’s accessible quickly, and being able to plan that out. Okay, how am I going to plan that? How many dish shelves of this type of drive do I want versus the slower ones? How many faster ones? Okay, how much storage space do I actually need for what I currently have? This device that I’m buying, you know, it’s going to have, at minimum, a five-year usage life. Am I able to calculate the proper growth rate so that I have enough storage space, but not so much that I’ve over provisioned and bought too much storage? So those were a lot of skills and things that I learned there as a manager, just really having to, you know, plan out projects. And I think that helped me, especially when I started to get more towards those architecture type roles or the engineering roles, thinking about those things for the business. I got a lot of exposure to there that I didn’t really have access to or have access to a visibility when you’re just an individual contributor as like a PC technician. So I would say that that was a good learning experience, definitely, and something that’s helped me a lot throughout my career. So if you can get to that level or be able to ask those questions to management, you know, if they’re telling you to do something or there’s a project going on, it’s okay to ask questions and understand like, hey, why are we doing this? You know, if you don’t have the ability, you know, they’re buying, you know, it’s a server hardware refresh, and the decision’s been made as to this is what we’re buying, this is how many, and this is why. You may not have any influence, but you can ask the questions and gain that knowledge and understand, oh, I understand that we’re buying this and we bought this many. Can you tell me why? How did you come to that decision? What did you use to plan for that? So those are a lot of questions that when I was working with my director that he gave me a lot of information to to really go through and understand that process. And that was beneficial. And at some point, I think one of the things that themes that is pretty consistent throughout my career is I would say on average, every about two to three years is what it would take to kind of clean up the new environment, get a lot of these projects completed up and running. And then once those projects and the cleanup kind of slowed down, I would get very bored very quickly, and have to kind of start looking and and see what else was out there for me. The other thing that kind of help or that kind of push me to start looking for that next role at that point was also that they felt and they the college and IT for the college felt that I should start looking at becoming less hands on. So we started to grow our team. I think now we were up to like four people, very capable people. They were able to do a lot of the day to day tasks. And they wanted me to kind of move away from the technical aspect and focus more on the management, you know, managing the people, managing projects. And really, they were also helping me at that time, they mentioned that they would help me groom towards, you know, what would be needed for like a director level position, right, understanding that doing a lot more of the budgeting, the projects, planning those out, scoping them. And while it sounded fun, especially because at some point I thought in my career, I wanted to move up and become a CIO. But when I got to that level of kind of moving away from the technical hands on and moving more towards like a director level, knowing me and knowing how quickly I would lose interest in in a role, if I wasn’t being challenged, I think ultimately led me to say, I don’t want to do management. I don’t want to be the director level. And it was going to be time for me to move on and find another role that allowed me to still do a lot of the project planning. I did enjoy that, setting it up, configuring, having influence in what was purchased, how it was set up, how it was configured, from a high level architecture standpoint, but not necessarily only do that. I wanted to be able to plan it and then implement it. So ultimately, I decided that it was time for me to kind of start looking and leave that role. And with that, before I kind of get into that next section and next part of the career path, I think this is a good, probably a good stopping point to pick up. And I’ll continue on with my journey on the probably next episode of this. So I will move on and continue on and talk about kind of how I moved on to the next role, some of the other things that I learned. And I think at this point is really where I start. Me personally, I think a lot of my career decisions start to make an impact and really learn a lot of techniques and a lot of things that I think help prepare me and propel me at the same time into a lot of the more senior roles. So with that, I appreciate you taking the time to go ahead and listen. If you can do me a favor, if you found this helpful, please go ahead and rate it, subscribe, send this off to other people that might be interested or looking at either maybe they just like listening and picking up a couple tidbits from some of the guests that we have on or maybe somebody who’s looking at getting into these types of roles and maybe they get some insight as into what’s involved and how they might be able to move into one of these roles. So with that, I appreciate you taking the time to watch and listen and we’ll catch you on the next episode. Thank you.