Episode Summary

iland Director of Cloud Market Intelligence Brian Knudtson is joined by guests Ben Liebowitz, Kimberly Delgado, and Anthony Spiteri for a conversation about the concerns IT professionals have with the security of their jobs when their company moves to cloud. They discuss the legitimate reasons IT professionals should fear for their jobs, what they can do to prepare for and embrace change within the industry, and how technologists can become more business-savvy. Is it better to be 10-feet deep in one technology or one-foot deep in 10 technologies?

Panel

Cloud Conversations

Topic 1

[03:52] What are you seeing in the real-world that should actually cause IT professionals to fear for their jobs?

Topic 2

[09:30] Ensuring job security is about ensuring you have a necessary job, so I always advise people to embrace change, because it means you’ll be involved in the change earlier and will be seen as a leader in that change. What can individuals do to be prepared to be this kind of leader?

Topic 3

[16:48] With the growth of the cloud, are the days of the pure technologist over? And if so, how can technologists start to become more business-savvy?

Cloud Bites

[05:55] “That’s an interesting fork in the road that I took, and I think I based it on job security moving forward.” — Anthony Spiteri 

[06:49] “I feel like there’s always certain roles, especially on the admin side, that are on the losing ends in acquisitions.” — Kim Delgado

[08:56] “There’s a lot more fear, I think, in terms of job security, because things are developing so quickly in different areas.” — Anthony Spiteri 

[09:52] “I 100 percent agree about how critical it is to embrace change, and you have to constantly find ways to reinvent your career.” — Kim Delgado

[11:49] “Having that ability to kind of actively seek out things that need work or that can help your customers, whether they’re internal customers or external customers, and really help build up your reputation for being able to solve problems is really important.” — Kim Delgado

[12:44] “One thing for me that helped me in my career was getting more involved with the virtualization community.” — Ben Liebowitz

[14:37] “Because of the way that modern applications, modern platforms are going, I actually think there’s a lot more agitation around our careers because we don’t really know which way to go.” — Anthony Spiteri 

[14:57] “When I’m learning a new technology, I put it out in Twitter, but maybe I’m not really realizing what it does to certain people because some people might go, ‘oh, man, I really, I’ve got to look at that, and if I’m not looking at that, then what am I doing?’” — Anthony Spiteri 

[15:54] “First of all, if you don’t know what your business’s high level goals are, you probably should figure that out, but also, you need to make sure that your skills are aligned with that.” — Kim Delgado 

[17:03] “I think you’ve got to make a decision, do you want to be technical all your career or do you want to do something more on the management side, the business side? And that’s something that we all should be thinking about at some point.” — Anthony Spiteri

[19:40] “I couldn’t be where I was now if I didn’t have the ability to see and talk on both sides of that coin.” — Kim Delgado

[21:51] “My second interview, he put me in a cube with a bunch of parts and said, build this PC. I had never done it before. I had never built a PC from scratch. I knew the concepts of what parts were needed and what goes where and what gets connected to what. But I’ve never done it myself. And I did it.” — Ben Liebowitz