Welcome to episode 51 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two VMware Solution Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In the first half of our discussion with Charlie Nichol, we talk about his early career and his transition to management.
Original Recording Date: 07-28-2019

* Charlie is currently a Senior Solution Engineering Manager for VMware’s Central US region (focusing on Enterprise) and has been with the company for 8 years. He manages a team of field pre-Sales SEs spanning Texas to Wisconsin.

Topics – Transition to Management with Charlie Nichol
2:40 Intro and Early Career

* Career history

* Charlie started in IT in high school and worked at a number of places after that.

* He cut his teeth at Almost Media Games while setting up globally available and highly redundant bingo and lottery systems.
* He later worked for Sequel Data Systems in Austin doing some pre-Sales and some post-Sales work related to networking, storage, and virtualization. This also involved training customers to operate the systems he installed.
* Charlie also did work for Home Depot on the Windows Engineering team and as part of the storage team.
* He later went to Dell and worked on a product team called Virtualization Solutions Engineering, writing performance white papers for hardware vendors.

* There was no Googling. He helped write the performance whitepapers people would later Google.
* After giving a number of demos to technical people and high level executives, Charlie found he enjoyed explaining technology to people.

* A friend encouraged him to interview for an Inside Solution Engineer position with VMware. The rest is history.
* Charlie comments on why he feels the SE job is the best job.

8:48 – Transition from Individual Contributor to Manager

* When Charlie first joined VMware, he felt like being a SE was his career path.

* Being an Inside SE involved doing many demos and working with customers from different parts of the country.

* Charlie’s boss kept asking what was next in his career path.

* At first, Charlie was thinking a CTO type role or an architect could make sense.
* His boss encouraged him to pursue leadership (not something Charlie wanted).

* The two paths within the SE space were to climb the individual contributor ladder to Principal or to move to leadership.
* Charlie’s desire was to stay close to the technology and maintain technical credibility.
* His manager had an uncanny knack for knowing when to throw an interesting project Charlie’s way.
* Since Charlie trusted his manager to help him succeed, he decided to take the manager’s advice to pursue leadership.

* Charlie’s manager began to groom him so we would be ready when a manager position opened.

* Charlie would sit in on meetings, take care of reports, or run a team meeting now and again.
* After the bug was put in Charlie’s ear, he started looking for opportunities to take on leadership tasks. Was it the frequency illusion?
* Charlie shares the story of meeting a new VP and how he took the opportunity to educate his VP.

* This led to the VP wanting a SE presence in future decision making meetings,