Welcome to episode 131 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share Jonathan Frappier’s early career story from teaching college courses and the application of that experience in the technology field which led him all the way to a job at EMC.
Original Recording Date: 06-16-2021
Topics – Educator to Technologist, Blogging and Giving Back, Small to Big Organizations, Landing at EMC
2:19 – Meet Jonathan Frappier

* Jonathan Frappier has been in technology for about 20 years and at present is focused on supporting applications that are customer facing and for internal teams running on AWS.
* Jonathan took some programming courses in college but found it was not for him. During his sophomore year, he started to wonder what else he could do in technology, eventually landing in Systems Administration.
* Jonathan did some teaching while working toward his Masters degree (around 2007).

* Interestingly enough, Jonathan decided to begin his resume’s experience timeline at this point but recently ran into "you’re too senior for this role" from hiring managers.
* He cut off 7-8 years of early career experience, which allowed him to get his current job.
* One of Jonathan’s first jobs was at CompUSA, which might have been one of the most valuable of his career. When there is gatekeeping in an interview process, you start to see what a hiring manager might see as a red flag.

* Listen to ways Jonathan used these situations to tweak his resume accordingly, making him look "younger."
* The same concepts from previous experience can apply to any other job.

* Jonathan was teaching some CIS and entry level computer classes. The desire stemmed from having some really good and really bad teachers in college, driving an interest in giving back and helping people.

* His first chance to teach was a class on Microsoft Office that had students of various backgrounds (not in computer science).
* Jonathan was passionate about being a good teacher for others, encouraging students not to leave his class. Listen to his story of encouraging a paralegal to stay the course, helping the student to understand the importance of learning the material.

9:54 – Technologists as Educators

* A large part of our role as technologists is educating other people on why we are doing things, why we ask users to use password managers, etc.

* To be successful, you must be able to communicate that technical information back to the business so they support what we are doing to keep the company running, to keep it secure, etc.
* You do the best you can at any point in time, and you just keep on trying to teach people.
* This is about meeting the person where they are.

* Jonathan’s role at CompUSA taught him to be able ask questions of people to gauge their understanding.

* Do we start with geek specs or solitaire and Microsoft Works?
* He might interact with 40-50 people per day, talking with some who understood technical components deeply and some who were buying their first computer.
* Changing levels of complexity with an audience is helpful, whether calibrating up or down.