Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #16 – DEX Certifications special (LIVE IN BOSTON)

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Reality Bytes #16 – DEX Certifications special (LIVE IN BOSTON) · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

0:01
Welcome it changemakers to the Deck show with Tim Flower and Tom McGraw. Let's
0:07
get into it. Hello, everybody, Welcome to Reality Bites. A very
0:12
celebratory episode we have for you today for so many reasons. The first of
0:16
them is extremely obvious to you, no doubt, because it's the celebration of
0:22
many of the Reality bite as being here together in person for the first time.
0:26
If you've listened to the show and you suspect that this here, I'm
0:30
a right hand SiGe might be Oriana, This here might be Megan, miss
0:34
him, might be Sam, this might be Tom, this might be Tim,
0:37
and you'd be absolutely correct, and here we are together for the first
0:42
time. Another point of celebration is that I'm an Tim Flower here. It
0:47
just became a granddad. Congratulations. Yeahs making me realize how old I am
0:51
to have But yeah, it's a tiny little peanut down in Pennsylvania. A
0:54
beautiful baby. What's her name again? The names maya? Congratulations, it's
0:59
a she's all quillent. Excellent. We're all in Boston, by the way.
1:03
At next think HQ. It's why we've been able to come together alike.
1:07
We have And the third point of celebration. Is that. Something we're
1:11
going to be discussing further on this today's audio visual episode is that next Think
1:18
has just released its Deck certification series and Megan it's one of the authors of
1:25
fact series along with the Long with Sean who's a you know, a regular
1:27
reality biter but currently on paternity leave speaking of babies. So you can get
1:33
to you get to soak up all the credit. I get to take all
1:34
the credit, all the glory. Tell us tell us about it, Megan
1:38
to us about Yeah, yeah, it can get to them what they are.
1:41
Yeah, it's really really exciting. It's it's on the Deck Hub,
1:44
so the home of the Deck Show. Um. It's a new, first
1:48
of its kind e learning course, totally free. It has five chapters.
1:52
You can take one or you can take them all, um, and they
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cover a range of topics relating to decks and learning about decks of the enterprise.
2:00
So, if you're already working with let's say next Think is a platform
2:02
or another dex kind of platform, or if it's just something that you're interested
2:07
in developing and skilling up your career, this is kind of the place where
2:10
you can learn about those concepts and about what you need to know to manage,
2:15
build and execute a deck strategy at the enterprise level. So I think
2:19
it's really cool, it's really exciting. Like I said, it has five
2:21
chapters. It covers setting a deck baseline, XLA strategy, building a tailored
2:25
it experience the dex ops team, so what do you need to build to
2:30
actually run a strategy like this at the enterprise level? And then finally ideating
2:34
decks in the enterprise, which is a fancy way of saying, like,
2:37
how do you really build and execute that strategy. It's sort of the culmination
2:39
of all the chapters that come before it. So we've already seen some really
2:43
good interest in it. We've seen a lot of people signing up taking the
2:46
courses, sharing their badges on LinkedIn, which is super cool and we really
2:47
appreciate. So yeah, I'm super stoked. It was a lot of work
2:52
getting it out the doorbut it's out there, and I'll just say that the
2:55
wonderful course is they're fun to do, they're challenging. You know, there's
3:00
no walk in the party. Everybody be aware. But we have, as
3:02
you say, we've got hundreds of deck students who have joined us and a
3:07
few dozen't graduates already it's an amazing job you Ensuan, and I already recommend
3:12
everybody checks them out. They can find them. The links all in the
3:15
show notes that all all all current certifications that are available right now. Inspired
3:21
by this good news about the certifications, we're going to be discussing careers off
3:25
skilling and themes like that. And Sam actually have the brilliant idea of everybody
3:30
starting the show by reflecting upon time in their career where they've picked up a
3:36
new skill. Correct me if I have this wrong, and that new skill
3:38
has kind of changed the direction of travel in their working life is absolutely Were
3:45
you thinking of something to start with you start? Take it back to the
3:50
early days of my career in the field of content marketing. Um, my
3:54
background was in journalism, and I was always you know, writing was someone
3:59
to my only skill for a really long time. But I entered the world
4:03
of B to B marketing with a certain some would say, a rational confidence
4:09
in my ability to adapt to this world. You know, jobs like these
4:15
types of content marketing jobs that I've worked in, you either enter as a
4:18
marketer first or a writer first. You're either someone who is very familiar with
4:24
marketing, and you learn how to kind of write to an audience or someone
4:27
with a degree of writing skill, and you you learn the ropes of whatever
4:32
industry you're working in. I was very much so the latter, and so
4:36
I learned very quickly that while it was easy for me to kind of learn
4:43
how to write to a B to B audience, I had basically no idea
4:46
how a marketing department worked at all, especially in B to B marketing.
4:51
And so I found myself about a year into my career in a place where
4:56
I could produce, you know, decent you know, marketing, blog posts,
5:00
ebooks, all types of content, but I had no idea how to
5:04
kind of take the next step of my career beyond just kind of managing other
5:12
writers, sticking very much so in just the editorial the editorial realm, and
5:16
I really what I what I learned in retrospect was I had no idea what
5:20
the purpose of any of this content was, and so I kind of took
5:25
it on myself. Earlier in my career, both learning from people internally,
5:29
but also I did things like a couple of the like courses that HubSpot offers
5:33
on digital marketing. My company had like kind of an opportunity where you could
5:38
you could take certain courses like this, and I kind of just learned the
5:43
ropes of things that weren't necessarily my specific marketing responsibilities. So I kind of
5:49
learned like what is like what do the email marketers at my company like do?
5:54
Like what? And and that's how I gained kind of like my relatively
5:58
rudimentary but less than zero like SEO knowledge things like that, and it really
6:04
opened me up to a place where once I learned those skills, I was
6:08
able to kind of step into like a content manager role where I knew the
6:12
purpose of this content beyond just the ability to kind of produce it um.
6:16
And so I would say that taking that kind of bonus on myself to educate
6:21
as kind of things like this deck certification offer um, but in the content
6:27
marketing realm really was what pushed me to the next level. Whereas I would
6:30
have kind of been stuck doing an adequate job of the thing I was most
6:35
comfortable with what you're going to say, podcastings, Oh well, that that
6:40
came out that the podcast naturally, that's a good example and I think it
6:45
correct me if I'm wrong with him. But the certifications are partly inspired by
6:48
the hub Spot certifications, which are quite famous and ubiquitous. The market is
6:54
Yeah, you wanted to provide a similar thing that you see professionals. Um
6:58
now the niche from somebody we haven't spoken to. Ye, good to see
7:02
you. Yeah, it's really great to have the whole group together. It's
7:05
good fun. And it's what about this question of great development new skills.
7:12
And you've had quite a sort of heterodox career and study background, right,
7:16
so I reckon there's going to be an interesting tangent. Not necessarily. That
7:21
was actually one of the big challenges when it came to this question, because
7:25
I have been very much in my niche for a while now. I've been
7:30
very focused on specifically qualitative research methods for about ten years now. So when
7:35
I got this question, I was like, well, I love learning new
7:39
things. I do it all the time. Things that have changed my path
7:43
not so much because I've had a very sort of traditional path for a ux
7:46
researcher. I was thinking of the psychology technology but like that that's been but
7:54
it's been consistent. Yeah. So actually one of the things I thought about
7:58
was when I was working in it, So when I started working in it
8:01
in college. It was literally just you know, the job that I was
8:07
using to help pay for my textbooks and things like that, and I wanted
8:13
a promotion, and so I learned how to support websites. So all of
8:18
the student groups and so on they could have a word press website essentially,
8:24
So I learned all of the different things you can do with word Press.
8:26
I would set that up for them, and I started teaching myself about web
8:30
accessibility because it's something that I was really passionate about, and also I was
8:35
getting a lot of questions about it. Right, people would come to me
8:37
for help with this, and there wasn't really anybody who knew about it.
8:41
So I just decided, Okay, I'm going to learn how to do this
8:45
and I'm going to become the person who does that. And yeah, they
8:48
gave me the job basically the webmaster for all the student resources. And so
8:54
that was something that was partially driven by passion. And I think that's one
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of the things that I hear a lot from my colleagues in IT is if
9:05
you have a niche that you're excited about, go for it. Learn about
9:07
it. One of my very good friends, she's been in it for many
9:11
years, and she recently moved into cybersecurity because she loves it, because she
9:15
finds it fascinating, and she's just doing a ton of training and courses and
9:20
certifications and now she's, you know, going to be a cybersecurity expert.
9:26
She does me that means she knows even less now because she knows how much
9:30
nobody knows about it. But I do think that that's one of the things
9:33
that I took away from that, and I've seen from other people too,
9:37
like, if you're in it, there are so many ways you can specialize
9:41
and develop your skills, and you should absolutely pursue it. It's really fun.
9:46
You can do stuff that's really enjoyable. So that was my takeaway from
9:50
that. So even though I didn't stay in it in that trajectory, it
9:54
definitely open mazed to a lot of different things that have you considered previous.
10:00
It's it's such a great question, isn't it, Because I think when we
10:03
will look at our careers, we all find these moments where something unexpected did
10:09
come along and did absolutely direct future. And I think Megan, you join
10:13
you joined next think with a background in sort of the nonprofit sector, right
10:20
in the charity sector, and so there must have been a change of gear
10:22
of air. Is that Is that what you had in mind for this topic
10:26
yourself? Actually, no, I'm going to can't talk can't your plan by
10:30
all means. I think what I was going to talk about is the reason
10:33
why or one of the reasons why I was able to get the job and
10:35
next thing with my nonprofit background, maybe, but like five years ago or
10:41
so, I got a job at a marketing agency as just a content writer
10:46
for an SEO team. And I knew the basics of you know, SEO
10:50
copywriting, and so that got me in the door. But they had an
10:54
analytics team that looked at like, how does content perform for our clients and
10:58
how how can we make like data driven content marketing decisions? And I was
11:03
immediately intrigued, But there weren't a ton of opportunities there for me to go
11:07
and learn from that team. And I felt a little bit frustrated by that
11:11
because I could tell that it was kind of like we were talking about it.
11:13
It made me feel curious, and I think that's been my instinct through
11:18
my whole career, is to just follow my curiosity. From like one step
11:20
to the next, and it's given me a really diverse skill set within marketing.
11:24
So I just went online and found that Google had a free course about
11:28
Google Analytics. It's not an amazing course, sorry Google, but you know,
11:33
it gets you the basics to understand your way around the platform. And
11:37
then I just started asking questions of like, if someone who looks at this
11:41
page, what other pages would they most likely look at this piece of content?
11:45
And I just slowly, over the course of like four years, got
11:48
an understanding of how to use Google Analytics to get that deeper knowledge and be
11:54
able to make data driven marketing decisions. And I think that's part of the
11:58
reason that I ended up as the content strategist at Next Thing. And then
12:03
since coming here, we have so much more data available to us than it
12:07
was available to me in the nonprofit space where they have no money, and
12:11
so Google Analytics is a free tool that's the only one you use. Here.
12:15
You know, we have all sorts of resources available to us to make
12:16
those data driven decisions. And I think I've really been able to grow in
12:20
the last year in terms of my ability to do that. But I think
12:22
it was just following my nose following my curiosity and like looking for that opportunity
12:26
to learn more and then just deciding to go for it, even if nobody
12:30
at my work at the time was saying, hey, we want you to
12:31
do this. No, I wasn't being asked to do it. I just
12:35
did it in my own polition. It took a couple of years for it
12:37
to pay off, but now it did. So Yeah, that would be
12:39
my story. Good advice in the young today. There you go, Not
12:46
to get on my soapbox, but speaking of young people, grant because me
12:58
and a grand dad is a lot like looking back at a thirty five year
13:05
I can go back. I started my I career in nineteen eighty eight.
13:07
I won't ask how old each of you were in the year. That makes
13:13
me feel really good. No, but I started at digital equipment at a
13:20
hardware vendor. I learned how to troubleshoot, I learned what customer service was
13:24
all about. But it was it's where I started to realize that the vendors
13:28
are really the ones who drive the certification. Right, you get a certification.
13:33
And my first trainings were in the deck hardware, but then I went
13:37
into novelle networking and I got my certification in Novelle, and that allowed me
13:41
then too, when I got kind of got tired of the rigor of being
13:45
in field service, to be able to jump to one of my customers who
13:48
was implementing a Novell network of their own. So I went to the Hartford
13:52
in ninety five. So I was able to then change my point of view
13:56
from servicing lots of customers in a given are to now focusing on just my
14:01
employer, how do I support thirty thousand, forty thousand, fifty thousand PCs
14:07
and bringing new automation. So each time we looked at automation, whether it
14:09
was SMS or altirists or ghost or semantic anti virus, you've got to learn
14:16
new technology. And what better way to really learn it but to force yourself
14:20
to get certified on it. And now you can prove that you're your expertise
14:26
is kind of backed up with that piece of paper. And then next thing
14:30
came along, and while at the time there was no certification and next thing,
14:35
learning that platform and really doing a ton of great stuff with it allowed
14:39
me to take the next transition and go from enterprise it to a software vendor
14:43
and change my perspective yet again on how to influence and how to really change
14:50
the dynamics of how enterprise it works. Yeah, it's so interesting. So
14:54
many career developments today predicated on learning to use than the tool, and that's
15:01
the same across the many. One other point too that you mentioned Oriana,
15:03
which is specialization. What I saw at Hartford was there were people who were
15:09
specializing in the deck mainframe environment and chose not to advance, not to go
15:16
to the new technology, and they became dinosaurs. If you specialize for too
15:20
long and you don't change and adapt and move, you're you're going to go
15:24
the way of the dinosaur. Right. It is always learning, always evolving,
15:28
and that's why I love certifications for us. It gives it people another
15:31
opportunity to broaden out and get certified in an area that's maybe not focusing on
15:37
the technology, but how to operationalize the technology, how to make the most
15:41
out of it. That's great. I mean, Sam, I wonder if
15:45
you could maybe give a bit of context to the reason the certification specifically.
15:50
I know you've written on the hub befloor about decks ups and how that's kind
15:54
of set this set this set the table in the industry for this kind of
15:58
skill set to be sight. Yeah. Absolutely, and I mean DEX as
16:03
both kind of a category and also a profession has you know, kind of
16:10
like we've seen over the past few years, companies are now they're hiring there
16:15
are job titles with you know, DEX in the title, Whereas you know,
16:18
years ago, we were at a place where it was kind of something
16:23
that certain people were ahead of others in terms of whether companies were kind of
16:29
embracing you know, DEX management and then also just a general understanding of what
16:33
it means. Whereas especially post pandemic, DEX has kind of become really integral
16:40
to the modern IT team. And so we've seen that reflected both in kind
16:45
of the way we talk about it, but also in kind of the job
16:48
market itself. And so I think for young IT professionals, a lot of
16:55
you know, any IT leader that I've spoken to, whether it's for an
16:57
interview on the deck shob or just internally when we ask them, you know,
17:03
what should young IT people kind of be doing UM and whether they're talking
17:07
about deck specifically or not. UM. The idea of kind of looking ahead
17:14
to what is what is the future makeup of an IT team and what are
17:17
the skills that these people are going to be doing because they are very different
17:21
than they were ten years ago. You know. UM, we talk a
17:23
lot about kind of the anxiety around what technology is going to replace and not
17:29
replace. What's next? Yeah, and people, you know, whether it's
17:33
in IT or you know, as a writer with things like chat GDP,
17:37
basically everyone's like, am I about to get replaced? But the reality is
17:41
more so that technology is basically handling certain kind of responsibilities of ten years ago
17:49
as IT team, whereas now there are all these kind of you know,
17:56
new skills because of the way the workplace is UM and so the younger IT
18:00
professionals specifically, the more they can kind of predict what those things are going
18:06
to be five years from now and kind of understand the trends around both decks
18:11
and just kind of the broader makeup of kind of the future IT team.
18:15
The more they can educate themselves on those things now, and especially if they
18:18
have you know, something whether it's the deck certification or something kind of official
18:23
that whether it goes on their resume or whatever that lends some authority to it,
18:29
those things are only going to be like, the value of that is
18:30
only going to like compound moving forward, and they could be universal. A
18:34
lot of the things that I've written about in terms of operationalizing next think are
18:38
founded on operationalizing earlier technology. The same principles apply. You've got to have
18:45
the right test rigger, you've got to have the right release management, and
18:48
the right deployment strategy, no matter what the technology is. So learning something
18:52
like that specific to one vendor opens up opportunities for you to think more broadly
18:56
about a lot of things. I'm glad you're saying operationalize a lot, because
19:00
I think that's the other component. So the idea of predicting the future super
19:04
daunting, almost impossible. There's always going to be changed. But if you
19:10
understand it from an operationalizing point of view, that means you're understanding how to
19:14
handle change right, how to make sure that you aren't just learning for the
19:19
next five years, but in three years you're learning for the next three years
19:22
after that, and so on and so forth. And I think that's a
19:26
really big component, and it's something I've definitely experienced in my career is the
19:30
more I learn about how to operationalize my work. The more able I am
19:36
to pivot to new changes, to learn new skills, and to help not
19:41
only myself but the people around me to adapt to changes. That's what operationalizing
19:45
is to me. It also gets the IT people out of their head,
19:48
right. It people both like the it stuff. I want to play with
19:52
something, I want to build it. I want to deploy it because it's
19:55
cool, and they don't focus on the soft skills. They don't focus on
19:59
the um you know, managing up and managing down and managing people, or
20:03
whatever your career trajectory might what you might want to take. I'll give you
20:07
an example my and I'll go back to some years before you were born,
20:11
my college years. My worst course in college was public speaking, and now
20:17
it's the bulk of what I do. So if you don't attack that and
20:22
identify it as a weakness and figure out how to improve it, I would
20:26
be I would not have the career I have today if public speaking was still
20:29
my weak point. So opening up those avenues for people to think more broadly
20:33
is a big help. It's a great point. It made me think that
20:37
in working on the certifications yourself, Megan, you know you have to you
20:41
have to where I can here. Generally, you have to familiarize yourself with
20:45
it, yeah, not just with the means of communicating about it or or
20:52
you know, distributing that content. Yeah. And if you were to think
20:56
about the certifications that we've just launched, and when you going through the questions
21:00
themselves, thinking about it from that perspective, which set the certification stood out
21:07
as looking like the most practically and also a few of the most engaging.
21:11
It's a good question. I'm thinking about this conversation about operationalizing, and I
21:14
think that more than half of the content in this certification is kind of about
21:19
that. It's about that idea of how do I It's a strategy that you
21:23
know, you can expand and you can use and iterate on it. I
21:27
think that that's one of the strengths of the certification because it's not a certification
21:30
on how to use next thing. It's not about our product. It's about
21:34
this new strategy, this employee first strategy. What do you need to know
21:40
to be able to operationalize that? If I had to, I don't know
21:42
if I could pick just one chapter, but I think that the first chapter
21:45
setting a deck baseline is you know, That's why it's the first chapter,
21:49
right, it's the baseline. It's how do you know? You can't change
21:53
what you can't measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. And so
21:57
that chapter I think really lays out like, here's how to measure something that
22:03
feels qualitative, right, Like, how are your employees feeling at work?
22:06
That's qualitative? So how can you measure that from an IT perspective? That's
22:10
what that chapter really talks about. And then I think the last two the
22:12
deck ops team and then ideating decks in the enterprise is about what kind of
22:15
team do you need to build and what skills should they hurt? Ye?
22:18
And what skills should you look for in yourself and in your teammates. And
22:22
then how do you actually take everything you've learned and really put it in motion?
22:26
And so the first chapter and then four and five would be my picks
22:29
on you asked for just one, but those are my favorites. The other
22:32
two are a little more like Xla and Taylor Aed. It is just like,
22:34
here's this one skill which is still important, but yeah, that's how
22:38
I feel about those. No, speaking of new skills, you've seen him
22:44
in action here today. Yea, our audience has you know we've been we
22:48
used to doing visa what is your visual podcast? But I think we've done
22:52
a decent job of it. And before we go, I want to say
22:56
shout out to Schean, shout out to DNA called it day. I hope
23:00
they can both do video pods and be with us in the flesh sometime soon.
23:06
And look, if you're if you're listening, if you're watching, we
23:07
hope you enjoyed it. And do check out those certifications. All the links
23:11
are once again, they're in the show notes and if you're a regular to
23:15
the decks of you may have come across them anyway. So I guess just
23:19
leaves me to say we'll see you next time, thanks very much. To
23:26
make sure that you never miss an episode, subscribe to the show in Apple
23:29
podcast Spotify, your favorite podcast player, and if you're listening on Apple Podcasts,
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make sure to leave a rating at the show. Just have the number
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of stars you think the podcast deserves. If you'd like to learn more about
23:41
how next think can help me improve your digital employee experience, head over to
23:45
next think dot com. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time,