The theme for the 2015 LabMan Conference (held at UNT in Denton, TX) is sustainability, and this closing keynote presentation talks about sustaining your career.

1. Sustaining Your Career
How to sustain your IT career and your skills in an
increasingly cloud-centric world
Scott Lowe
blog.scottlowe.org
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2. Before we begin
— Get involved! Audience participation is encouraged and requested.
— Feel free to take photos or videos of today's presentation and
share them online
— If you use Twitter, feel free to tweet about this session (use
hashtag #LabMan2015 or handle @LabMan2015)
— A PDF copy of this presentation will be available online after the
event
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3. Brief background
— 20 years in the IT industry
— Authored or co-authored 7 books (2 more books in
the pipeline)
— Speaker at events worldwide
— Been through a couple of major industry transitions
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4. 4

5. Sustaining your career
means sustaining yourself
and sustaining your skills
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6. What do you mean by"sustaining yourself"?
— Sustaining yourself is different than sustaining your
skills
— This is about sustaining your ability and capacity to
learn, grow, and adapt
— This is about sustaining your ability to deal with and
manage change
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7. The only thing that is constant is
change.
— Heraclitus
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8. If you dislike change, you're
going to dislike irrelevance even
more.
— Eric Shinseki
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9. Sustaining yourself (continued)
— Strive to maintain a strong "work-life balance"
— Pursue learning outside of your career
— Prolonged bilingualism can improve cognitive skills (see
http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/lib/thesis/
2008/2008boesen.pdf)
— This may be true for music and various other hobbies as
well (no conclusive evidence yet)
— Avoid burnout
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10. Anyone here like working hard
to only accomplish a
little?10

11. Avoiding burnout through efficiency
— Find yourself a trusted system (GTD is one example)
— Stop managing e-mail and start processing e-mail
1. If you can do it in less than 2 minutes, do it.
2. If it takes more than 2 minutes, put it in the trusted system.
3. If you need the information in the message, archive it.
4. Otherwise, delete the message.
— Stop using your inbox as a "to do" system---that's not what it
is!
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12. Sustaining your skills
isn't just about technical
skills, either.
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13. Sustaining skills
— Non-technical skills are very important in a cloud-centric world
— The non-technical skills are, in fact, more important than
technical skills
— Early 2013 IDC white paper (available from http://
www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/presskits/learning/
docs/idc.pdf) lists some important skills sought by hiring
managers
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14. Important cloud-related job skills
1. Risk management
2. IT service management
3. Project/program management
4. Business-IT alignment
5. Technical skills in cloud implementation
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15. Important cloud-related job skills
1. Risk management
2. IT service management
3. Project/program management
4. Business-IT alignment
5. Technical skills in cloud implementation
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16. A sidebar on business-IT alignment
— Talk to the business: Find out the goals of the business,
and think about how IT can help achieve those goals.
— Don't use IT jargon: The business doesn't care about
IOPS, RAM, GHz, TB/PB, SAN, NAS, NFS, or VTEPs. They
care about meeting their goals.
— Try to say "Yes": Don't tell the business "No"; instead,
tell them what it would take to solve their problems.
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17. 17

18. Important cloud-related job skills
1. Risk management
2. IT service management
3. Project/program management
4. Business-IT alignment
5. Technical skills in cloud implementation
The proof point for this list is the strong adoption
of...
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19. DevOps
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20. What do these
skills have to do
with DevOps?
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21. DevOps isn't just about technology
— Some of these non-technical skills could be considered part of
DevOps
— Consider the "Three Ways of DevOps" (http://itrevolution.com/
the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/)
— The First Way: Systems thinking
— The Second Way: Amplify feedback loops
— The Third Way: Culture of continuous experimentation and
learning
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22. Technical skills
are still important,
though!
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23. Some technical skills to investigate
— Automation and orchestration
— Cloud services
— Open source
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24. Anyone here being asked to do
less with more?
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25. The reality is we're
all being asked to
do more with less.
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26. This is why
automation and
orchestration are
important: they are
force multipliers to
enable you to do
more with less.
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27. Automation and orchestration examples
— Configuration management (Ansible, Chef, DSC,
Puppet, Salt)
— Cloud orchestration (OpenStack, CloudStack,
VMware vRealize Automation)
— Scripting (Bash, Perl, PowerShell, Python, Ruby)
— APIs (REST, JSON, XML)
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28. Cloud services
— To become a "broker of cloud services" to the business, you
must understand how these cloud services work
— Major providers include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and
VMware
— Most (if not all) of these providers have "free tiers" that
make it easier for you to experiment and learn how they
work (and what their value is)
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29. Cloud services (continued)
— Lots of different cloud services to consider:
— Compute (EC2, Azure, GCE)
— Storage (Dropbox, Box, S3)
— SaaS
— XaaS (DRaaS via vCloud Air, DBaaS, etc.)
— Each of these may offer value to your organization
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30. Open source
— Open source is affecting how IT is evolving
— Linux is increasingly pervasive in all aspects of the data center
— OpenStack is a leading open source cloud management
framework
— Open vSwitch is a key open source networking project
— Not to mention a whole host of other open source projects, like...
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35. Remember the goal: IT exists to
support
the customer35

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37. Ambition is the path to
success. Persistence is the
vehicle you arrive in.
— Bill Bradley
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38. Thank you
Be sure to provide feedback to the VMUG leaders regarding
this session.
Blog: http://blog.scottlowe.org
Twitter: @scott_lowe
GitHub: https://github.com/lowescott
Life: Colossians 3:17
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