Show Notes

Episode Summary
In this enlightening conversation, Manuel Martinez sits down with Jason Frame, Chief Information Officer at Southern Nevada Health District, to explore his remarkable journey from typing code from magazines as a child to leading critical technology initiatives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Jason shares candid insights about career progression in technology, developing leadership skills, and building successful teams.

About Our Guest
Jason Frame serves as the CIO at Southern Nevada Health District, overseeing IT operations for public health services across the Las Vegas area. His organization provides essential health services including restaurant inspections, EMT registrations, and primary care for underserved communities. During COVID-19, Jason’s team led technology efforts for contact tracing, testing, and vaccination management, demonstrating how IT leadership directly impacts critical public services.

What You’ll Learn
– How Jason’s early experiences with an Apple IIe and Commodore 64 sparked his interest in technology
– The transition from programming to leadership roles and the skills needed for each
– Why being a continuous learner is crucial for long-term success in technology careers
– Practical approaches to communicating your achievements to management
– Jason’s hiring philosophy: “I hire for fit and train for skill”
– Strategies for stepping outside your comfort zone to accelerate career growth
– Practical advice for job interviews and salary negotiations
– Why networking and community involvement matter in technology careers

Key Insights
“If you never ask, the answer is always no.” – Jason shares why taking initiative and seeking opportunities is essential for career advancement.
“Don’t reject yourself.” – Jason discusses why you should apply for positions even when you only meet some of the qualifications, noting that men often apply when they meet just 30% of requirements while others might wait until they meet 100%.
“Be prepared to show that you’re a learner.” – Jason explains how continuous learning is the most important quality he looks for when hiring technology professionals.

Episode Highlights
– Jason’s journey from coding games on an Apple IIe to managing complex IT systems
– The evolution of IT roles from specialists to versatile technology professionals
– How to build relationships that advance your career
– Practical strategies for developing both technical and soft skills
– The importance of creating a culture where team members are recognized for their contributions
– Resources for professional development and continuous learning

Connect With Jason Frame
Find Jason on LinkedIn to continue the conversation about technology leadership and career development.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/framejason/

Join the Conversation
What career challenge are you currently facing? Share your questions and experiences in the comments section. We’d love to hear how you’re applying Jason’s advice to your own career journey!

#CareerDownloads #TechLeadership #CIOInsights #CareerAdvice #TechnologyCareers #ITLeadership #ProfessionalDevelopment

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their experiences and their career with the goal to really understand how they’ve managed it and try and uncover any tips or strategies that they’ve used that you can go ahead and implement as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jason Frame. So he is a CIO for the Southern Nevada Health District and I’ll let him go ahead and explain a little bit more of kind of what some of the roles and responsibilities that he has, you know, and exactly what they cover. I met him a couple of years back. So we had interacted probably at different networking events when I had attended, when I used to work in the public sector and then eventually I became an SE for VMware, called on his account. So really got to know him a little bit, you know, a more intimate level, understand kind of what he’s done, what he’s been into. He does a lot of public speaking. So I thought he’d be a great person to kind of come in and share his experiences. So with that, I’ll introduce Jason Frame.

Jason: Thanks, Manny.

Manuel: No problem. Appreciate you coming on and, you know, again, we’ve connected and the fact that you were willing to kind of share your experiences.

Jason: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to that ever since I’ve seen a couple of these podcasts before.

Manuel: So if you don’t mind, just so that people can, who don’t know you, if you just mind telling us, you know, kind of what your role is, I already mentioned your CIO, but again, what are some of the responsibilities for there and then what do you do for the Southern Nevada Health District?

Jason: Perfect. So again, I’m Jason Frame. I’m the Chief Information Officer at Southern Nevada Health District. For those of you who don’t know what Southern Nevada Health District is, we’re the local public health agency in the Las Vegas area. And we also do, besides the public health things that we do, like the restaurant inspections and, you know, we register all of the EMTs in the valley. We make sure all the ambulances are inspected. That’s some of the public health activities that we do. We’re also a primary care provider. So we’re around those communities that are underserved and we’ve opened up multiple clinics to really serve that, the population that’s not getting the healthcare services they need. Another thing that we did, if you remember that couple of years ago, the small thing that happened called COVID, that we were the lead agency on all of that. So everything from the initial contact tracing, testing, doing the vaccinations. We have a public health lab that actually did the tests. And that was all pretty much what we did.

Manuel: I know we’ll get into it, but I’m assuming you have to really support all of that and understand the infrastructure and how you support, especially because it’s remote and diverse. Like for people that don’t know Southern Nevada, you know, it’s Vegas, Vegas is why, but I’m assuming you also cover kind of some of the surrounding areas.

Jason: We do. I mean, we’re mainly in the Las Vegas area, but we also get down to Laughlin. We have an office in Laughlin. We have a Laughlin office in Mesquite. We go out to Pahrump sometimes. We’ve gone out to, you know, as far as up to Ely and some of those other smaller towns, we’ve sent mobile clinics up there to help them out. We sent one with a dentist just to do checkups. So we do help pretty much all of the Southern Nevada area. Our state is so geographically diverse and there’s only a few different health districts in the state. Most of the time when you’re in a, you know, a lot of the states, basically the health department is part of the city or the county. In Nevada, we’re a little bit different because we’re our own jurisdiction. We’re not part of the county. We’re not part of any of the cities. They all have representatives on our board, but we are independent. There’s a couple other independent ones in the state, ones up in Northern Nevada and then Carson City. They’re kind of independent, but they’re also kind of part of the city county of there. And Washoe County has their own health department. Other than that, for the other 13, I guess counties, it’s all just the state that does it. And they’re very limited in what they can do. So we try to help out where we can.

Manuel: So if you don’t mind now, so we know what you currently do, just kind of give us back, you know, kind of go back a little bit to kind of, you know, where you grew up and eventually, you know, at what point in stage you kind of got into technology. Everybody’s different, so.

Jason: So I grew up in Carson City, Nevada. Moved there when I was about four and just, you know, pretty much grew up there until high school. Started playing with technology with the Apple IIe way back in the day. You know, that and then my Atari 2600, that was my introduction to technology. And then we had Commodore 64 and we played around with that. Got into, you know, just being in the computer. I really enjoyed it. I had an uncle that was in IT for the Air Force. And even though I didn’t see him very often, when I did, it just interested me in what he was talking about. I remember going back out as a kid and you buy magazines and I’m just dating myself, right? Or you buy a magazine and you take it home because there was a computer program in that magazine. But this is back before the days of putting a CD or a floppy disk in. No, it was on paper, you had to type it in. And so you’d type in the game and then you get to play it. And, you know, you got to think back, you know, with the Atari 2600 being an eight bit game, this is probably another step back from that. It was more like text-based games or stuff like that. But I loved it so much that I go in there and test it. And, you know, I played around and then I’d see it. Oh, how can I tweak this a little bit? And, you know, just playing around with that code to make it either do something different or do something better for me. So I started off doing that. Got my own, my first computer when I was 10 years old, I guess, back in like 83.

Manuel: And then just kind of, I’m assuming at that point, you just kind of continued on, you know, messing around with it. And, you know, as a 10 years old, I remember something similar. So my dad had his own business. And I remember like the first, my first experience was they had one, they did their accounting and it was the big five and a quarter floppy disk and, you know, doing things like that. And I would get to play with it probably like on Fridays after school, like go hang out. But I never thought that that would kind of lead into a career. So I’m assuming at 10 years old, it’s just fun and interesting. So what kind of transpired? Did you decide like, hey, I want to pursue this as a career?

Jason: Yeah, so I mean, I took up a program in classes when I was in high school and really started to enjoy it. And I was like, oh, this is something fun. And then it came, it’s like late junior year. I was like, what do I want to do with my life? You know, I was working in a grocery store and I’m like, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to go to college and I want to go figure out something, but what do I want to go to school for? And I wasn’t really thinking business or anything like that. So I was always good with technology. So I’m like, yeah, I’ll look at IT. And so I started off at UNLV as a computer engineering major. Made it through the first couple of years and said, you know what, I don’t like the engineering as much, the EE side, the electrical engineering. It was not very attractive to me. And so I moved over to the computer science side because I wanted to do the development and just really work with applications. And so I went, you know, continued on computer science and got my computer science degree at UNLV.

Manuel: And was it the fact that, you know, you mentioned the playing around with the computer, like with the more text-based programs, is that what kind of fed some of the software side of it and make you say, hey, this is what I want to do as opposed to like the actual building of the components?

Jason: I think so. I mean, to me, I can go, and I’ve built so many of my own PCs for so long. I just, I give that up about 15 years, 10, 15 years ago, I just buy a Mac and I’m good. But I really enjoyed the fact that I could have an idea and I could write a program to make it work. To me, I’m not an artist. I mean, I can barely draw a stick figure very well. I’ve never been very artistic in that way, but I’ve written some really cool code and I’ve developed some cool applications that, you know, I took it from my mind, kind of, I kind of picture it as an artist sees, they see something on a blank canvas and they, oh, I know what I want to do. And boom, it’s there and it’s the masterpiece. I don’t visualize it that way, but I can see it on code. And I said, okay, I can see how this can either work better or faster or actually just work. And that, to me, was the challenge was, you know, I have a problem, let me figure out how I can do it. I can figure out how I can solve it with technology and either make my life easier or, you know, have some fun with it or whatever, or make some money with it. And so that really attracted me because to me, that was a great thing that I could do, whereas I had other friends that were very artistic and I was kind of jealous of them, because I’m not that way.

Manuel: You’re starting to also develop like troubleshooting and also those, like that critical thinking, right? And I would imagine, it sounds easy, like, hey, I have this idea in my head, I’m gonna put it to code, but having to go through, and I’m assuming it wasn’t an easy process, right? You’re gonna have to kind of develop, okay, I want it to do this. You have this blank canvas. How did you kind of go about and determine, you know, was it just through what you had learned at school to say, okay, I know that this is the logic that I have to put in here. This is, you know, this is how I need to, you know, format this and, you know, I can’t have this at the very end if I needed to do checking at the beginning.

Jason: Yep

Manuel: There’s gotta be a thought process.

Jason: And you gotta think back, when I started in computer science, Google wasn’t even around yet. You know, I saw a great t-shirt, I thought about buying, it says “I survived CS before Google.” I remember sitting there and we’d be in the UNLV lab and it was on old Sun Spark stations. And everything was text-based. You’re using the Emacs and you’re developing everything text-based. And so fortunately from my previous experience, that really helped, you know, because I knew how to type it in and kind of debug in that way. I knew how to do that before the invention of the IDEs. You know, we didn’t have any of that when we were going through. So it was all by scratch. And then, you know, how are we learning? Well, when you go to the library and we’d check out books, you know, I think everyone in our generation had that the little blue C book, you know, it’s a blue C on the front because that’s what we used. And then we just really got to the point where, okay, how do we tweak this so much? And then I took the assembler language class, we learned how to tweak things to make it better. And that one is one of my favorite classes, the professor there, he challenged us to, you know, to kind of go above and beyond. It’s like, oh, here’s the assignment, but, you know, if you want to go extra, these are other things you could do. And I remember writing some code and it was like, probably like 28, 30 pages of code to make basically all it did was show, you know, press like control D or Alt D or whatever, and it put the date up in the corner. And instead of just putting like, you know, one slash 30 slash 08, I actually had it Thursday, January, whatever. And so a lot of extra code in there because you had to move everything in and out of the registers. But it just showed me and it gave me an appreciation of how the newer technology makes that easier. So taking that step back, but also we’re able to now learn how to tweak things to make it even faster.

Manuel: So then you’re doing this, you know, as you’re going through college, I’m assuming you completed your, you know, your computer science degree. And like most of us that have graduated and gotten that degree, I’m assuming it wasn’t right away like, hey, I have a degree, everybody wants to hire me. So what was that experience kind of getting out of college? I mean, some people have done internships, you know, vice versa, so.

Jason: So my first job in IT was actually not even in development, it was a hardware job. And I was, as a summer job, my dad worked for a grocery chain up in Northern California. And I went up there and they were transitioning from the old check stands where they typed in the numbers to actual scanner systems. And they, hey, Jason, you know computers, why don’t you come up here and be on this team for the summer and make some money and you know, whatever. So we were traveling around all these little towns in Northern California and started getting good at that. And about four or five weeks into it, they had me start running the team. I started running my own team to do that. And we go into a store, we’d have to scan every item in the store and there’s hundreds of thousands of items. That takes a long time. And then we had to train the users. And then, you know, we start that on basically Monday and then, you know, training people on Wednesday and Thursday, Thursday night when the store closed, we had a crew that would come in and just rip out all the old stuff. We had all the stuff ready to go, put it in, plugged it in, got it up and running. And then Friday morning, we’d open up the store with a brand new system. So I got, you know, experience with leading a team and getting experience with training and understanding how to help users understand the change in technology. And that was my first real introduction to that. So I did that for the summer. And then again, at Christmas break, I went up there and basically had to go back to the stores and just visit with the managers and make sure that if they had any problems, they could go to the store and help walk them through it. So that was my first IT type job. About a year later, it was my first year staying down here rather than going back home. And so I stayed here in Vegas for the summer and I got an internship with, it’s called RICO at the time. And what they did is they ran the Nevada test site. So they were a subcontractor to the Department of Energy. I was in the HR department, but I was in the IT part of the HR department. And I was doing programming on their mainframe systems and developing and updating their applicant tracking systems and all the reporting systems for EEOC and those types of things. So I was actually doing coding. That was my first programming job and I really liked it. I was a part-time employee. And so I was interned through the summer. Then I was a part-time employee once school started because they knew that I was going to school. Then RICO lost the contract. They’d had it for like 30 something years. They lost it and Bechtel was coming in. And so they gave us, I think it was like August 1st or something they said on September 30th, it’ll be your last day. So that was my first experience of the layoff too, which is pretty common in the tech world. We’d get a lot of those. And so I’m like, okay, I’m still in school, whatever. And found another job and a couple months after that, month and a half after that, I got another job for a small company here in town. And they were defense contractor. And they did all the stuff for the Army Corps of Engineers, the regulatory branch. And it was a text based system. It was all running on a Unix machine. And we developed the front end. We developed reporting systems. We developed ways to do correspondence and form letters and all that using different applications. So I did that job. That was my junior year of college. And then I actually worked there for about 14 years. So I was fortunate. I didn’t get out of school without a job. I had the job and basically the week after graduation, graduation was on Saturday. So on Monday I started to new as a full-time employee with the salary and it was really good.

Manuel: And it sounds like at least those first couple jobs, right? Like even though they were temp jobs, it’s a wide range of skills, right? You’re leading, you’re training. I didn’t realize it at the beginning, but starting at help desk and doing that PC tech type work and help me and I’ve seen you talk to, you know, to users, talk to other people and being able to explain technology in kind of layman’s terms. Do you think that that’s where that kind of came?

Jason: I think it really did, it was my first job, I think I was only 19 or 20. And I had to, I couldn’t just talk tech to them. I was talking to one lady, she was 70 years old and she’d been doing the punch check stands for 30 years. And she’s like, I don’t know if I can do this. I’m like, you can, it’s easy. And so I just kind of walked her through it. And so I learned how to speak to people on their level. And I think that’s really kind of carried forward. And one of the things that I’ve done a lot and I preach to my team is, don’t talk technology, don’t talk server models or anything, they don’t care. Talk about how you can help them solve their problem. And that’s kind of the key that we’ve done and it’s been very successful.

Manuel: So you mentioned you worked at that company now for 14 years, was it doing the same type of work the entire time?

Jason: Yep, it was pretty much the same type of work. You know, to be honest with you, my first three to four weeks there, I wrote more code than I did in four years of college. You know, I was basically, that’s all I was doing was writing code and I was doing a lot of stuff that I learned in college, you know, I was parsing files. So, you know, we were writing a parser in college and I learned how to do some of that. Well, I had to tweak that and modify it to make it work for what we did. And then as I grew in the company, as I got more advanced, then I was doing a little bit higher level stuff. So at first I was doing a lot of data cleanup and just, you know, a lot of just basic C programming, you know, importing text files, cleaning them up, exporting them. Then I started working on, you know, more database stuff. So I learned all the database applications. A little bit later on, I was in the one person who was doing all the correspondence stuff left. So I got put over that. And we were using WordPerfect at the time because it ran on the Unix machine. And we had these complicated macros where you would have, you know, embedded all this code in your document and our macros would run and pull data from the database and do all these different things like a mail merge before mail merges were allowed on Unix. So we were able to do all that and it was a really eye-opening experience. And then a little bit later on, we started doing some Windows-based programming. I was the lead Windows developer. You know, all the other guys were Unix guys. And so my boss said, “Hey, why don’t you learn how to do this?” And we got a project for a local company here. We weren’t doing just DOD stuff at the time. We were also helping out in the community, doing other companies. And, you know, he said, “Let’s see if we can do this.” We got a job, a contract to build a system, basically taking data from an AS-400, bringing it into a Windows environment for a radiology company. And it was a way to manage all of the scans that came in from their radiology scans and then have them dictate them. And so we wrote the dictation app and all that. So they dictate it and manage it all through our app. So that was an interesting job. So I was the lead on that. And then I did a bunch of year 2000 conversion stuff where we were moving off of Vax machines and into a more modern architecture. So during that I learned, you know, in the other projects, I learned how to use like Microsoft SQL, I learned how to use Oracle with the other stuff. So I got a good database experience through that.

Manuel: You know, you mentioned that your manager, your boss at the time said, “Hey, why don’t you learn this?” Is that something that during that time and probably earlier on, you know, he’s getting to know you and understanding that you have a curiosity, also a drive to kind of learn more and not just say, “Well, no, this is what I do.” And I’ve come across people that, “Hey, I’m a database admin and that’s what I do.” And there’s, it’s starting to become a little bit more common. I remember when I first came in, like, “I’m a database admin, I’m a server admin, I’m a network guy.” And they wouldn’t kind of cross pollinate or try and understand. Was that common during that time for you to kind of do a number of different things? Is that kind of what brought you up and helped you move around?

Jason: I think it did. And especially in the role, I mean, that company that was in, there was only six of us at the time. Then there was down to five. So it was a very small company. We had to take on multiple hats. You know, that when I moved into, you know, went to work in the government agencies when I was helping out with the year 2000 conversions, I saw that. There was DBAs, there were server admins, there was backup admins, there were all these people. You know, and I didn’t really understand a lot what that meant because we just did it all. You know, I wasn’t just a this, I was an IT guy. And so it took me a little while to figure out and understand that. And even coming into the job at the district, when I did, it was about 16 years ago, we still had some of that in place. Not quite as bad because we weren’t as big. So we didn’t have those perfectly designed roles, but we had a lot of that same stuff. And I look back now and I know there’s still a lot of that going on in the industry, but I think those are all dinosaurs now. I think the way the technology is changing, you can no longer be this, because you just have to have more wide range and experience. So even when I talk to my team now, I’m like, don’t just think that this is all you’re doing right now, I try to get them extra experience because if that’s all they do, if all you are is a server admin, and then we say, you know, we’re going to the cloud, what does that do to you? You don’t know what to do. And so it really makes you unemployable.

Manuel: Would you say it’s okay to have maybe a specialty area? But again, still have the breath, yeah, the breath, but have maybe a depth and say, okay, hey, I’m really proficient, I maybe have that 400 level knowledge here, but I do know maybe 250 to somewhere across.

Jason: I definitely think that’s good, because if you don’t have that breath, you’re in trouble. There’s not a whole lot of that out there anymore. And you look at even just the job postings now, no one’s really looking for those types. They’re looking not just for specialists, they’re looking for generalists. They want people that have a good idea of how to do all these different things, because right now with our economy, there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, they can’t specialize in certain things. They need to hire someone, they might be able to do two or three different roles. And so I think generalizing out a little bit more is the best way of doing it.

Manuel: And I’m gonna kind of jump ahead a little bit here, as the CIO, and you’re kind of building the team and building that culture, how would someone go about, and it’s gonna be a two part question. What would you recommend that somebody go through to kind of develop that breadth of knowledge? And then two, what’s the best way to kind of demonstrate that? Like let’s say I’m applying for a role, okay, maybe because it is so wide, well, how do I demonstrate that I know enough and I can learn?

Jason: Yep, I think that’s a great question. To me, how do you get that experience? It’s really gonna depend on the organization you’re in, because if there’s not a culture of that, it’s gonna be tough. You’re gonna have to go out there and kind of search it out on your own. But from what I’ve seen, most guys when you ask them, hey, I wanna learn a little bit more about this, they’re eager to show you, because they wanna brag about how good they are, right? And so I feel if that’s something you wanna do, just go ask. I wanted to get more involved in leadership. I sought out opportunities. And about 11 years ago now, we had a thing going on and our IT manager left and left an opening. I went to the director. I’m like, I wanna take that as an interim. And he was like, well, I don’t know, you don’t have management experience. I’m like, exactly, how am I gonna get it? And so I took that step and they actually chose me for the interim and then it’s led to where I’m at now. But I think you have to just be willing to show an eagerness for it, talk to the people around you. If your supervisor is not helping, then take it on your own to go and find opportunities to do that. And it might mean talking to someone else in your organization. It might mean I need to go online and start learning stuff. There’s some great resources out there now. I mean, I see all the time on my different social feeds where, oh, you can take this class now at Harvard for free or at MIT or Stanford, and it’s all free. And so there’s some great courses out there if you wanna start learning. And then once you get that little bit of knowledge, then you can go and talk to your supervisor and say, you know what, I’ve done this class, I’ve taken these steps. I want a little bit more responsibility.

Manuel: So it’s really just making sure that you’re taking that initiative. Just me doing hard work and saying, okay, hey, I’m really good at this. It’s not gonna just come. You’re not just gonna say, oh, well, he does a lot of good work. Maybe he wants to do management or maybe he wants to do this. You have to seek it out and kind of go through that.

Jason: I think there are some times where the latter happens where you say, okay, he’s doing a great job. Maybe it’s time to promote him up into or her up into this position. But if I see someone who’s interested in it and they’re coming to me, hey, I wanna get better. I wanna do this. I wanna, you know, whatever it is, that’s gonna at least catch my eye. So when next time I know I got another opportunity and it might not be a promotion, but it might be, hey, we got a new project. You wanna be part of this. And so making sure that you say that and you make that known that you wanna actually do more than what you’re doing. You know, and there’s ways of doing it where you don’t come off looking like you’re trying to kiss up or anything like that. You know, if you’re genuine about it and you’re expressing that interest, if you have a decent supervisor, then they should recognize that. And, you know, I know I’m this way and I know a lot of other people are, we wanna be challenged. That’s why we do our jobs. You know, I don’t wanna come to work every day and do the same boring thing, you know, like making a widget or something like that. It would drive me crazy. I wanna be challenged. I wanna take on new opportunities. I wanna take new risks because that to me is how you get better and how you have more fun at work.

Manuel: And it’s probably, it’s what makes, I think, our field so rewarding, right? But if you’re the kind of person that just wants to come in, clock in, clock out, do my daily work, to your point, right? You’re not gonna find that specialist who, okay, this is all I do, crank this out all day. You’re not gonna progress. You’re not gonna find, you know, the value. Because I talk to a lot of people, they wanna get into it and, you know, they wanna move up. They can, they see people are doing all these cool things. Hey, I can make a decent living, right? I can support myself, probably a family. But it’s really anybody that I’ve gotten in contact with that says, “Hey, I wanna do what you do,” or, “Hey, can you explain what’s the way to get into it?” First thing I usually ask them is, “Do you like learning new things? “Are you okay with change?” If the answer is no and no, this isn’t the field for you, right, like maybe find, you know, there’s nothing wrong with a trade. Hey, become an electrician and become a very good one or, you know, any of that.

Jason: I think there are roles in IT where that’s okay. You know, help desk person might be okay for them at the time. If you’re, you know, back into those old roles, like a backup admin, okay, that’s all you wanna do. That’s fine. We do have a couple of people like that on our team now that have been there, you know, 20 something years. And all they wanna do is certain thing. You know, if you ask them to do something, they’ll do it, but they’re not gonna volunteer to do it. And so my job is now just get them to try to either change or I just recognize that, okay, they’re gonna be great at whatever I need them to do and they’re gonna be solid on this. I’m not gonna ask them outside of their zone. But I’ll find other people that are more eager to do it.

Manuel: In like that leadership position, you almost have to kind of understand and play to their strengths and maybe it’s okay to kind of push them a little bit out. But then once you see that this is, you know, you’re not getting that response, then at some point it just stops.

Jason: Right. I mean, we all know the old adage of the person who works the hardest gets the most work, right? You gotta be very careful of that. But you know, but the ones who really enjoy it and the ones that are striving for more, they’re gonna feed off of that. They’re gonna love it. Because that additional work they’re getting is not the same stuff as they were doing. It’s higher level things. And that’s gonna drive them. The only downside I can see to that, and to me it’s not a problem, but I know it is to some leaders, is once they start getting a feel for that and they start getting better at stuff, if you’re not able to provide that to them, and they’re gonna find another place that they can go. And for me, I’ve never been upset when someone’s left. You know, sometimes it’s like they leave for, you know, I gotta move or whatever, but sometimes it’s like, you know what, I’m taking a better position. That’s great. I’m sorry we couldn’t give you one. We actually had a guy at our office where he could have, he was so much better than what his role was. But we couldn’t give him even the pay that he deserved in that role. And another job came open in town and I said, you know what, I’d hate to lose you. You’re one of my best employees. But you gotta, you’re starting a family. You know, you just got married. You’re looking at having a kid. You’re gonna be doing almost the same type of work for about 25% more than what we can pay you here. And it’s a better opportunity for you. And there’s more chances for advancement there than you’ll ever have here. I think you really need to look at this. And that was a big step. And a couple of other people in our group. Like, why’d you tell him that? Because, you know, we don’t want to lose this guy. But I’m like, he needs, you know, my job as a leader is to do what I can for my people. To me as a leader, my people come before my company. And so I want to make sure that they’re taken care of. And if that means they go off to somewhere else, fine. We’ll find someone else.

Manuel: Well, and I think you mentioned it, right? Like that’s a sign of a good leader is helping develop them, move them up. And it sounds like you’re not worried. If they leave, that’s fine. We’ll find somebody else. And guess what? We’re going to do the same thing and kind of continue that. It’s not necessarily churn because they’re overworked or they just, they don’t like it. Or you’re terrible management, right? A lot of times people say, you know, people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad management. But I think the also, the inverse is true. If you’re being a good manager, a good leader, they’re going to leave. But because they have the support to say, I should do this, not, hey, I have to because I’m uncomfortable and I don’t like what I’m doing.

Jason: Yeah, I think it comes down to, you know, and not just saying it, but living it. So we had a guy who worked for us and he’s, you know, got his degree and is doing some cyber stuff. And he said, you know, it came to me and said it’s a hard decision, but I got offered this other job. It’s going to be great, you know, and I, hey, great, no problem, we kept in touch. This was back in 2019. Well, 2020 hit, what happened? COVID. So I was, you know, we were busy doing stuff, I’m following the news and I see the company he went to announced 60 something thousand layoffs. So what that first thing I did, text him, hey, how you doing? You know, cause we kept in touch a little bit. And he’s like, you know, not doing okay right now, but you probably read about this. He’s like, yeah, I’m going to be one of those. I’m like, we’ll take you back tomorrow if you want. And cause we hadn’t even filled this position yet. It was hard to fill. And so he’s like, let me think about it. And he called me up a couple of days later. It’s like, are you sure? I’m like, yeah. So he got let go on a Tuesday and then started back with us on Wednesday. And it was funny because it happened to Wednesday, April 1st, 2020. And so when I sent out the email to our team, hey, welcome this person back, blah, blah, blah. Ton of people were like, yeah, yeah, April Fools, April Fools. Actually, no, we’re serious about this one. But to me it was like, I could have burned that bridge You know he would have left You know say “I’m not going to hire you again.” But no, I was like I reached out to him, said hey we got this opportunity he didn’t even have to come back to me and ask I went out and asked him.

Manuel: And I think a lot of that has to do with probably the way that he approached it, right? He wasn’t like, “Hey, here’s my two weeks. I’m out,” right? The fact that he was open and said, “Hey, there’s this other role. This is what I’m interested in.” And I think that’s early on in my career, not that I burned bridges, but I didn’t, I wasn’t aware of how to communicate that properly. Like, you know, as a PC tech, I just be like, “Oh, hey, I’ve got this other, a better opportunity.” But I’ve noticed that if you have the right leadership and say, “Hey, I have this other opportunity. I don’t have the room to grow here.” Or I feel like I can’t just, again, you don’t have to give them every single detail, but just being a little bit more open as to, “Here’s what I’m looking for and here’s why.” Only once I established how that worked, once or twice, I had like a account offer. Like, “Hey, can you give us a minute? Like, what if we come back and, you know, they tried a little bit more money, but, you know, hey, what if we give you this kind of training?” And I was like, “Oh, well, let me think about it.” And at the end of the day, we had a conversation to say, “I get the more money. I get the more training, but training is not going to replace the hands-on experience that I think I’m going to get here. Can you guarantee that I’ll get that?” And they’re like, “Well, we’re working on it.”

Jason: Yep. And I read the article, “Never Accept a Counter Offer.” And I understand the process in that. But I think it’s great. And, you know, what’s what you’re talking about and learning that, especially in the earlier stages of your career, is tough because a lot of the people coming into tech, and let’s face it, they’re introverts. They are focused on the hardware, the software, whatever. They don’t have those soft skills. And so that, to me, is some of a problem with what the education is. We’re not teaching the people the soft skills the right way. But also, if they haven’t had managers have taught them those soft skills, too, that’s really a disservice the managers and supervisors are doing to their people. Because if they don’t have those skills, they don’t know how to come and talk to people like that. So, you know, we talked about people leaving bad managers, even during COVID, where the turnover in IT was huge. You know, there were so many opportunities. We lost like two people. And we were stressing people out. There was times in early 2021 where our first meeting was at seven in the morning, we’d end about midnight. You know, it was a stressful time with COVID and all that going on. And we still didn’t lose anything. And the first one that we lost, she moved to the Philippines. So it was like not because of anything that we had done. It was, “Oh, I got to move.” So I really agree with that. And I tried to create a culture where people don’t want to leave. There are times when that has to happen, but very, very little turnover.

Manuel: And you mentioned communication. And you’re right. As I’ve moved up and kind of looking back, talking to people and helping them out, like, you know, at the end user part, that came with experience. But trying to go through and communicate and say, “Hey, how do you become more open with your management, open with your team to kind of understand and build that culture?” Is that something that, you know, do you think a course would help people do that? Do you think it’s more culture-based? You know, I mean, what would be the way to kind of develop?

Jason: I definitely think it’s culture-based. I think it really starts with the leadership and has to really come from the top down. That culture is not there. And it depends on how your supervisor is. And if, you know, your manager or supervisor came up in the old tech way, you know, they’re a great technician, let’s make them a supervisor. That’s not always the best thing because they don’t have those soft skills anyway. So if they’re not focusing on that, starting that conversation might be tough, you know, just because of the personality type. So you really got to kind of feel it out. If you’re not getting it there, find other ways to get it. Like if you’re not comfortable speaking in front of people, go to Toastmasters. You know, look up Toastmasters or something like that where you’re out talking to people. Go to some of the meetups and just start getting to know people. And that’s a big start of it, is just getting out there and talking to people. When I was in college, I was in computer science, right? I was in all the science classes. I was, you know, I was an introvert and I knew I was. And so I went out of my way to seek out opportunities to change that because I knew if I ever wanted to be successful, I would have to change that. And so I remember going into grad school and all my computer science professors, “Hey, come get a CS, a master’s in CS. You know, you’d do great at it, blah, blah, blah.” When I got hired on with my full-time position at the job after I got my bachelor’s and we also hired a guy with master’s, like right after that, he was making less than $2,000 more than me. I’m like, “It’s not worth it to me to go into a master’s in CS for that little bit of money.” But I looked around, I’m like, “Well, if I get an MBA, it’s going to be much more.” And so I’m like, “I’m going to go do that.” Put me way outside of my comfort zone. Now I’m on the other side of campus with all those, you know, those weird people that don’t know anything about tech. And I took a couple of MIS classes, you know, in the business school and I was like, “Wow, these people really don’t know anything.” It was kind of funny. But then I was like, “Well, I’m going to go over there and take and do my master’s in business.” So I got in with that, started learning the language of business, started learning more about soft skills and communications and those types of things. So for me, that was the best step. And I was still a little bit nervous coming into it and I talked to the dean of the college and he said, “Hey, we got an MIS 101 class that we need someone to teach, want to teach it for us.” I’m like, “Wow, I’ve never got up in front of people and spoke like that before.” You know, maybe in a classroom setting of like 15 people. I’m like, “Yeah, why not? I’ll try it.” Kinda greedy my, you know, aside there, the reason why I really wanted it, because I got the staff parking sticker at UNLV, so I didn’t have to park, way out, you know, in the parking lot at Thomas and Mack. But it was a great thing for me because I had to learn really quick to get over my fear of talking in front of people, to get over my anxiety of not sure if I’m right or not. Because you know, once one of the professors that I had told me, he’s like, “When you’re up there, you’re the expert. I’m just looking at you. They’re not going to… Most of them aren’t going to question you. Maybe one or two might, if you say something wrong, they might catch it, but most of them won’t.” So that kind of gave me a little bit of a comfort level. And I just knew that it taught me also how I needed to prepare to be able to get up in front of people and talk. And so then that evolved into other opportunities where I was then called in to speak in front of classes and do other things. And then now led to this, where I’m speaking on webinars and speaking in podcasts and at events, doing panels and stuff.

Manuel: And all that just came really from just kind of putting yourself out there, getting uncomfortable and continuing to do that. Did you think at the time that doing the public speaking… So I’d never had a problem. I would do the… Like similar to you, like in a class, where you had to give a speech to the class, you get a little nervous, but it wasn’t bad, but kind of moving into those types of roles, did you think that it would play as big of a part in your career as it did? Or at the time you’re just like, “Hey, I just want to get past this one thing.” Because I know sometimes it’s two things. It might be good to look at it at the micro level, like, “Hey, I just want to improve in this one area.” And sometimes it’s the macro, like, “I want to improve in this area, but here’s what I think it’s going to do for me.”

Jason: Combination of the two, really. I never thought it would get this big. I never pictured myself doing these types of things. But I knew if I wanted to get ahead and I wanted to be more than just a developer or something like that, I needed to be able to speak to higher level people. And so that’s kind of where it led. So I’m like, “Okay, I need to be able to go out and talk to people and understand how to communicate to them in their language, rather than just what I know in tech.” When you’re talking in front of a class, usually it’s people with the same background as you, and you’re talking about what you know, or what you’ve researched, right? So you’re pretty much an expert on that. I knew that that’s not going to always be the case. You might be in a room and you’re going to get a question where you’re not the expert. Well, how do I respond to that? And so I knew I had to continue to grow myself in that aspect if I wanted to go anywhere besides being a developer my whole life.

Manuel: And now in this, the time that we live now, there’s a lot of social media, there’s a lot of remote jobs, there’s a lot of areas to be able to go through and communicate. And thinking about it now, like, “Hey, I’m doing this podcast. I’m being able to go through a network and talk to people and ask questions.” And it was uncomfortable at first because going through and telling somebody, “This is what I’m working on,” was not something I was used to doing. Even internally, like, I would do it, but some people have got branding, self-promotion. Communicating to a wide range of people is great. And kind of circling back to what we talked about is having that culture to be able to talk to your manager and make them aware of what you’re doing. I guess starting in kind of a smaller role, not having to present to a large group of people, how should somebody go through an approach communicating internally to say, “Hey, here’s what I’m working on. Here’s what I want to… I think that I want to do in a way that doesn’t feel… I’m sure there’s some sort of practice behind it. Let’s say, I’m going to give you an example. I work for you and I’m an admin and I want to kind of move up. I want to get more responsibilities. What are the ways that I should go about doing that and communicating that to you to say, “Hey, it’s not, “Look at all these awesome things I’m doing. I’m the best employee you’ve ever had.” It’s, “Hey, I’m doing these things, but how… What would you recommend I go through and approach you?”

Jason: You have to promote yourself a little bit, but you got to do it in the right way. It’s like, “Hey, look at all the stuff I’ve done.” It’s like, “I learned this. I learned this. Hey, can you look this over for me and make sure I’m on the right track?” Ask with an inquisitive mind and ask your supervisor, “I’m working on this. What do you think about this? How can I improve?” Really kind of start it that way rather than, “Oh, look at all this great stuff I’ve done.” Because if someone does come up to me like that, my first mindset is, “That’s awesome, but let me see where you could have done better.” Because I want to challenge them in that way. I don’t want them to just think, “Hey, they’re great.” That’s good to have, but I don’t want them to just come in with that mindset. So really it’s kind of helping them walk through it with them. For me, it’s asking open-ended questions. “Oh, really great. How did you learn that? How did you come up with that idea? I want to get kind of behind that.” Which one thing is I love in my role is when I’m out talking to vendors. If I get a chance to sit down with the founder of a company or CEO, I love that time because I don’t care about their product. I’m asking, “How’d you come up with that inspiration? How’d you do this? How’d you do this?” The tech part kind of sells itself. I want to get to know more about their process because that’s how I need to grow more. To me, that’s the way, and as a manager and as a leader, I’m always looking for ways to ask that anyway when I’m talking to my team. It’s like, “If I know what they’re doing, oh, that’s great.” Then what I do is I look for opportunities to get them in front of other people to talk about what they’ve done because they’ve done really good things. A lot of times in an organization, the leader gets credit for all the great stuff the team has done. To me, when I get that, “Oh, yeah, IT did this, this, this.” I go, “Oh, it was these people that did this. We’re a whole team, but I want to make sure that they’re recognized.” I want to make sure that they get that recognition, but also when we’re then explaining it to something like that, I’m going to say, “I’m not the one who wrote it. Let me have so-and-so explain it to you.” They might fumble through the first couple of times, especially when they’re talking to the leaders, but then they get more confidence. Afterward, after we go through those sessions, I try to pull them aside and coach them on it. You did really good there. You stumbled there. I could tell you were a little bit nervous. Here’s some tips to help you not be so nervous. I try to give them that coaching throughout the conversation.

Manuel: I like that approach where you said, “Hey, here’s what I did,” but coming at it from an inquisitive standpoint and saying, “Hey, here’s what I’m doing. My on the right track,” and then maybe even just trying to find out and say, “Is this filling a need?” From a leader, you’ve got the big picture. I think if you go from it from an inquisitive standpoint and saying, “Hey, here’s what I’m working on. Would this be beneficial, yes or no?” Then, like you said, now you’re aware of, “Hey, this is what they’re doing.” You’re probably asking, “What made you think of that?” Maybe they’ve identified a gap that you’re not aware of, or, “Hey, you’re working on something that’s not going to benefit, but I have the bigger picture to say, “Try this instead.”

Jason: We could use that skill over this area. Yep, definitely. I’ve done that quite a bit. One of the things I always say when we’re talking to our colleagues in the business is the best innovations I’ve seen in our agency haven’t been coming out of IT. They come from our frontline staff saying, “Hey, I’d like to be able to do this better. We’ll come up with a solution, but they’re the ones that tell us that problem.” They say, “This might be a better way for us to do something, but we don’t know how.” Getting there, how is our job. Knowing the ideas though, we’re not going to be able to solve business problems. We don’t even know what those problems are. A lot of the greatest things have come from our frontline staff just saying, “You know what? This would really make my job easier if we could do something like this.” Then we figure out how to make that work at a cost effective way or if we can or not, but then we try to find it rather than us trying to come up with ideas. Because if IT is pushing down ideas to make the business better to the business groups, it’s not going to go over very well. But you say, “Hey, your staff was telling us they have this problem. Here’s what we did to alleviate this problem.” One, the staff is going to be happy and their leaders are going to be happy that their staff has taken ownership of their jobs and they’re also going to be happy with what we’ve done.

Manuel: A lot of that I think comes back to you mentioned, is the culture. You obviously have the culture that people can go through and bring that to IT either to you or to other people and just understanding that. They’re like, “Hey, this is a partnership. IT is not the … I hear this often. IT is … They’re a cost center. We put them over there and keep them out of here. We only talk to them when we need something, but they’re not going to come and talk to you if you may need something if you’re not building that relationship.” To your point, if I’m not forcing stuff like, “You’ve got to use this new cool IT software that we bought because we think it’s the best thing since sliced bread.”

Jason: There are going to be times where you have to do that. For example, we went from on-premise Cisco desktop phones and we said, “You know what? We’re moving off of this because they’re all getting old now. They didn’t want to replace it and spend the money to replace it.” We went on to Microsoft Teams phones. We’re like, “We’re moving to Teams. You’re not going to have a desk phone anymore. You’re going to go to soft phones.” We had to, but because we already had that relationship built and we’ve already done so many other great things, we got very little pushback on it. We had a couple people say, “Oh, I hate this,” but most of the time they’re like, “Yeah, we’re able to work with this. It’s different, but we’re learning it.” We spent a lot of political capital the last few years before that building up to that. There are those times where you have to say, “This is what we’re doing. It’s the thing that we have to do and it’s not fun, but we have to.” If you’ve done all these other things in the past, they realize that. “Oh, you’re not just saying this because this is the easy way for IT.” They understand that this actually needs to be done and then they’ll help us with it.

Manuel: In your role, how do you? I guess, what are some of the things that you have to think about outside of … You’re thinking about the business side. You obviously have learned how to communicate. I had another CIO and he mentioned business English to technology English and understanding how to do that translation. But also, you’re having to plan ahead because especially in the government, there’s budget cycles and understanding, “Okay, here’s how I want to go through a budget.” Let’s say … Again, I like the scenario-based thing where, “Okay, let’s say I’m now engineer. I want to get into a management and I’m in this role.” What are the types of things that I should be doing outside of reading books and understanding, but how do I determine and understand how to do a lot of that forward planning?

Jason: A lot of it is just asking. And being sincere when you ask about it, but there are … I will caution that sometimes it’s hard for us to even allow that to happen, especially in government because of the regulated environment. We have a union that says, “Well, they’re working out of their job description.” They don’t like that, even though someone might want to learn. You got to kind of toe that line there to make sure you’re not violating the bargaining contracts, but really it’s just kind of working with the team. I’ll give you an instance right now where I have two managers right underneath me. Every year we do a satisfaction survey with all our staff, our supervisors and up throughout the district. They tell us how we’re doing and they tell us how we’re screwing up at times. It’s kind of nerve wracking when you get those results coming back. Then afterward what we’ve done is we take the survey results and it’s a nationwide group or a worldwide group that does this for us, but we’ve tweaked that process where we take those results, we pull out the one for each department and we meet with every department one on one. We do this every year now. We say, “Okay, here’s the results that we got. Everyone did this. District wide, here’s what our numbers were. Here’s what your numbers were. Also, here’s what everyone else’s numbers were by department.” We’re very transparent with this. Then we ask them, “Okay, tell us where do we drop the ball? Where do we miss on this and what can we do better?” Or sometimes we’ll get good scores, 90s and 100s. You like what we’re doing so far, how can we do more for you? We just have that conversation. I’ve run those for the last four years. Starting a year and a half ago when we went through those meetings, I let my two managers start to take on a couple of those. They fumbled through it a little bit. This last year, they did 95% of them. I let them do it. I sat there in the background. I jumped in where I needed to, but I let them take ownership of that process. Next year, I probably won’t have to do any of them. They can now do it. What it’s doing is giving them that experience to be able to speak to the group, get in the more visibility in our agency too. All the other directors and managers and supervisors know what these positions do and what these two people do that’s a little bit different from each other, but they also know them as people. Then this year with the budget, I pulled them in and walked through the whole budget. I took over. I was like, “Well, here you go. This is it.” He left. I had to learn it all on my own. I’m like, “Well, I’m going to show you how to do it and show you what I have to think about,” and brought them into the process. It’s kind of a little bit about how the hot dogs are made. No one wants to see that, but we got out of the first meeting and they’re like, “Wow, this is kind of crazy.” I was able to walk them through over a couple of meetings and then next year they’re going to be more involved in the budget.

Manuel: As you’re kind of going through this, I understand that you being inquisitive and sometimes it’s out of necessity. Like, “Hey, you’re the person that has to go through and do this. How are you going about doing this? Are you a big reader? Do you read books? Do you have … I know there’s different organizations, especially, again, just networking to other CIOs and other executives, VPs, depending on the title and the position. Networking is it a combination of both? How are you developing those skills and understanding and knowing, “Hey, I’m doing it this way, but maybe there’s a better way that I’m not aware of,” or, “I am doing it the better way. Let me share it with everybody else.”

Jason: I read some books. Most of the books I read are on leadership, not even technology anymore. I think there’s some great leadership books out there that I read, or I listen to them on Audible when I’m out walking. Other ways I do it, I watch some podcasts. I search on … I’m online on social, mainly on X, and there’s some certain people that I follow. A lot of the stuff I’ve really leaned toward more is about the experience things, like employee experience and customer experience and those type of things. I think our job is really going from a technical job to an experience management job. How is the patient experience? How is your customer experience? I think that’s really what we have to focus on as leaders. It’s not thinking about, “Oh, how do I make sure that my tech’s good or I’m secure,” and all that. That’s all part of it, but what experience am I given to either my staff or my employees or my customers or the public? I think that’s where the role is shifting a little bit more to managing the CX and EX. I went to a conference last year, and it was a customer contact week. It was all about all these sales and marketing people out there for call centers and different stuff. It was a total shock for me because it’s something different. I was thinking every CIO needs to be here because this is the future and how we’re going to change how people interact with us. I actually got to talk about that with another group. That’s some of the stuff I do, podcasts I listen to. I do a lot of webinars, not just on … I’ll do some tech ones too, but I’ll do some on leadership. I’ve joined different networking groups where I’ll go and just network with them. There’s a few of them in town. Most places have SIM, the Society for Information Management. I think it’s a great one to get involved with. Then just finding other specific ones. I go to the CISO one. Even though I’m not a CISO, I am in charge of security for our agency. I go to a lot of those. Sometimes they’re talking about stuff that I don’t really understand, but that’s bringing me out of my comfort zone and it’s making me learn. I look for those opportunities to grow like that.

Manuel: I’m a big reader and I’ve had a bunch of people read. I understand it’s leadership. Again, it’s not a tech book, but even if I’m personally and just looking back on my career, I think even if you’re not looking to be a manager, those types of books are actually helpful. Even as an individual contributor, is there any one that you would think of that really comes to mind and says, “Hey, this is a really good book. If you haven’t checked it out, either audible or read it.” You