Sean Sebring:
Welcome to SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Sean Sebring, and with me as always is my co-host, Chrystal Taylor. So today we’re going to get a nice, as evergreen as possible, topic that we can fit in. You’ll have just your host Chrystal and I talking about continuing education and not necessarily in the traditional sense of the term continuing education, but what does it mean for you as a professional, especially for us in our IT careers, but it can definitely go beyond that, but all things that come to educating and upskilling yourself. So I’m super excited to host this episode with Chrystal. She brings it up in just about every episode, her passion for continuing to grow, develop, and learn, and it’s also safer that I act as the primary host on this to help keep her in check with her enthusiasm for such a topic. With that being-
Chrystal Taylor:
Guilty.
Sean Sebring:
… said, that being said, I would like to just go ahead and say, Chrystal, what do you want to start off with?
Chrystal Taylor:
What do I want to start off with? I think that, let’s answer the broad question. What does continuing education mean as a professional? Because I think that there are several schools of thought on this. Some people feel like in order to progress their career, they have to go back to formal university and get another degree. Like, if they’ve already got a bachelor’s degree, they go back for a master’s degree or if they’ve got a master’s degree, they go back for a PhD. And it’s like that is a way to go about it. But I like to think especially in IT that there is so much opportunity for continued education and the way that you think about it should be different because tech is so dynamic. It’s constantly changing, evolving, adapting. We’re constantly having to change what we do and how we do things. And even though some things have stayed the same for some time, eventually they are going to change.
And right now, as we’ve talked about many times over the past year or so, AI is causing another kind of tech revolution and similar to other kind of technical revolutions that have happened in the past, it requires you to change your mindset on how you feel about learning because there is a possibility that your job role will be made obsolete by technology advancing. And this is not a foreign concept. It is scary. Sure. I mean, no one wants to be replaced by AI or by a machine, right? I am sure that the people who originally made machine parts by hand didn’t want to be replaced by assembly lines and robots that make those things now, but it is part of human innovation, and so it is a normal part of our process. It’s just accelerated from what we may have expected in the past.
So I think that brings us back to what is continuing education and why should you be considering it? And I think that we should always be learning something. Now, it doesn’t mean that I’m telling everyone they need to go out and get another degree because I myself do not have any degrees. So I’ll be completely upfront about that. I don’t have any formal education. I went to college for about a year and a half and I dropped out. It was not for me. I think that I’m firmly of the opinion that different people learn in different ways and that we as a species should be more receptive to that. I have a whole other conversation about recruiters looking for degrees that I’m not going to have right now, but I do think that we should always be open to learning new things, like changing our perspectives on things will change the way that we work on things and the way that we do things.
And that also helps us advance in our careers. If you’re just constantly repeating the things that you learned from a textbook or a certification course or a whatever, and you never think outside the box, you’re not going to get very far in your career because you’re not contributing anything new, you’re not contributing any new thoughts, you’re not changing the way that you think about processes. And as we continue to evolve and technology continues to evolve, you do have to kind of change those things to meet the needs of the time that you’re in, not the needs you wish were there. Does that make sense? I could continue talking.
Sean Sebring:
Oh, I’m a hundred percent in the belief that you could. No, no, I agree. And to pick on us, right before we went into record on this episode, we were talking about different types of exercise, maybe hating the gym, loving swimming, enjoying running. And one of the things that was said actually by one of our production team members, give him a shout-out here, Nick, had mentioned, if you don’t like it, it’s just not a good way to exercise. And so when I was thinking about education, it goes exactly with what you were saying. It’s like we all have different styles, ways we learn, and to me, what is continuing education? Fitness, I think is a great way to look at it. And you can look at fitness in two aspects. One is relevance. If you think of survival of the fittest, the one that’s most relevant to their environment is the fittest to survive.
So there’s relevance and we think about that a little bit more in the sense of professional fitness when it comes to education like I’m relevant in this industry. But the other thing that I think is more important, because we shouldn’t always just be focusing on professional career. We’re humans and if all of a sudden work wasn’t a thing, I still want to be fit. And so it’s your ability to learn and your eagerness for learning. So that fitness, so not just am I in good shape to continue on the fitness analogy or not just am I in good shape for this one thing, but am I in such good shape that I’m able to be adaptable to the next thing? So fitness I think is a great way for me to look at what is education and it’s so easy. Guilty myself in the last year and a half, it’s so easy to just forget you’re supposed to continue growing and focus on all the little fires that happen in front of you in your day-to-day job.
Chrystal Taylor:
Well, and it can be difficult to make time for it. I think that of all the people that I talk to on a regular basis, or if they have a job where they’re constantly putting out fires, it’s a challenge to justify the time to take out to go learn something new. And it doesn’t even matter what they’re attempting to learn. We’ll get into that things that we think that we should be learning in a minute, but I think that it can be difficult to set aside time, and I wish that more employers helped you set aside time to continue learning. Even if it was an hour a week or not even a maximum amount of time. I don’t think an hour a week is enough. I’m just going to say that right now. But I think that it is critical for employers to also promote continuous learning and not even just a formalized form of learning.
As we mentioned before, people learn different ways, but any way that you’re looking to progress yourself because it also helps them, right? You said earlier, and I really love that, was that it makes you more adaptable, right? The more skills you have or the way that you change your thinking or whatever capacity is, the more open-minded you are, the more receptive you are to hearing and learning new ideas and how to function differently and change your processes to suit different needs. It makes you more adaptable, which inevitably makes you even more employable. Because the reality is, as I mentioned kind of at the top, is that tech is always changing, which means that we have to be adaptable, as adaptable as the tech that we’re using. And if we’re not continuing, we stagnate then A, we get to a place that’s not good. You compared it to fitness, and I think that’s a really good analogy in a lot of ways.
Look at all of these advertisements that they have for older people to exercise their brain with mental games and things like that and think of continuing education in the same fashion. I really like your fitness analogy. I’m going to keep it now. I think that it’s really important for you to stretch your brain to think about things differently and to learn different things, and there’s always something new. I think that’s the best part about working in tech is that there’s always something new going on. It’s not like working in plumbing. I don’t know how often a big stride is made and a whole change comes about the whole industry. It’s not… Maybe once every 25 years or something and they have invented a new type of pipe that changes everything. But in tech, it’s like every day there’s some new thing that somebody thought of that’s cool and helpful and people are looking at ways to use tech to help them do different tasks and whatever.
And so there’s always something interesting going on, and if you just explore a little bit, take a little bit of time, 30 minutes a day, whatever you can do and just work on something. And I don’t think it’s just technical skills, which I also will always talk about. I don’t think you should only work on your technical skills. I think that interpersonal skills, not soft skills, are just as important as the technical skills. And with those interpersonal skills, we’ve talked about this before we had, I think we did a whole episode on that, but those interpersonal skills are what sets you apart as a technical person in the field. If you have more interpersonal skills, if you are able to communicate well with your customers or your end users or your boss or your executive board or whoever, those things elevate you and they get you opportunities.
We had a guest not that long ago, Josh Vanhoose, and he and I have talked about how a year or two ago he was scared because he got invited to go speak at a tech conference as a security professional, and he was not looking forward to doing that. It required something of him, but he feels passionately about the job that he does and what he’s doing and he’s very good at making himself understood by everyone. I absolutely love talking to him about security. I learned something every time I talk to him, and I think that he let himself be stretched. He let himself be convinced by someone who appreciated his interpersonal skills and his technical skills that this was a good thing for him. And it has been wonderful. I’ve talked to him since then and he’s spoken on a couple other stages and they’ve implemented more things that required both sides of those skills. And so it really advances your career when you can do both of those things. So I’ll let you talk now because I’m endlessly talking.
Sean Sebring:
No, it’s good. And I’m glad you appreciate the analogy just to kind of, I suppose keep it going, but some of the relevance of it is you started off that part by saying, we don’t make time. It’s just like the gym, if we’re going to talk about it like fitness, you make time to go to the gym. People don’t feel like going to the gym all the time. And I think that education and just training your mind needs to be the same thing. Again, guilty as charged, right? I don’t do it enough. I do it with Duolingo is one of my ways. I’m like all right try…
And it has a streak reminder, they gamify it, which is always nice, try and just incentivize, gamify, but it’s just something that is dedicated to why am I doing this? Do I feel like doing it? No, but one, I can’t lose that streak, man. I don’t want to lose that streak. But more importantly is when you’re done, you’re like, “God, that was so fast. That was so easy.” And I did, I stretch the part of my brain and just with fitness and exercise, get uncomfortable to get comfortable.
When you talked about Josh, that’s a great example of an experience can be educational too. It doesn’t have to be a course with a certification at the end of it, but just challenging yourself to do new things can also be a form of education. Obviously that’s not specifically what we’re talking about with continuing education, but that was a cool experience for him to have been able to explore. And so kind of thinking about it in the same light as just challenging yourself, making it a habit, making a routine of what am I dedicating myself to? And if it’s not daily, that’s okay, but try and do it as regularly as possible so that it’s a muscle that’s developed and it’s used to being used. I think that helps so much. One of the things you said that I really want to appreciate is skills beyond technical.
There are some skills that you feel once you’ve learned them and you pass the course or even if you’re naturally good at them, communication skills are a good example. Just your ability to speak if you’re a good speaker. Some people are gifted with that, but technology changes more than just technology. Technology changes humans behaviors and interactions with each other. So there’s new things to learn about how we should communicate. It’s not always verbal, it’s not always email. Email’s not the best anymore. It might be a team’s message or a quick message with a nice red dot. People click read. In fact, podcasts are a form of communication. Bite-sized episodes, people prefer those over a bigger, maybe a video broadcasted thing. So there’s so much to stay on top of that it doesn’t have to be just technology. Stay on top of the interpersonal pieces of education too and you’re never done because it’s changing and growing as we as species evolve and change our cultures.
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. You mentioned a couple of things there that I want to dig into. I think that now there has never been a better time to focus on learning or not even focus on it. You don’t even have to focus on it. There’s so many opportunities and so many things, free resources out there. There’s so many people that have a side hustle and it’s a YouTube channel where they’re teaching people about things or it’s a Twitch stream where they’re showing you how to do something from coding to crafting or whatever.
Whatever the thing that you’re learning is as long as you’re working on something a little bit, I don’t even think it has to be tech related in order to make you think about things differently. I think that we benefit from having different experiences and different voices in the room. So if you want to focus on your personal growth and that personal growth leads you to crafting, that’ll make you think about something differently. It might make you think about how building software works differently because when you make something, you think about things in a different way than if you never make anything.
I think that there’s a good opportunity with lot of free resources, there’s the paid resources out there too. There’s lots of learning sites like LinkedIn Learning and Pluralsight and Coursera and those types of things. There are formal universities, which we mentioned earlier, but I also think you highlighted earlier what we were talking about like an experience can be a learning opportunity and I think that that’s really right. The first time I ever went to a big show, I went to Cisco live a few years ago and it was the first big expo that I had been to and I didn’t even get to attend any sessions. But just being on the floor with all of those people and walking around and talking to people and just getting the experience of being around other people who are in tech and they’re maybe doing something similar, maybe they’re not doing something similar.
That experience was a huge learning experience for me as a person. And I think that anytime you get an opportunity to go to something like that, maybe it’s a free event, maybe it’s a paid event, maybe it’s not. Sometimes you can get your company to pay for those types of things if it’s going to benefit the company. And I know that from experience, some people can get very heads down while they’re there and like, I’m trying to find this one thing while I’m here, but try and take a moment when you’re in those spaces where you’re surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other tech people to just absorb and learn from them in the space. Have a conversation. Maybe they’ll have an idea that you hadn’t heard before. Maybe it’ll be a sentiment that they shared that you hadn’t experienced. Whatever it is, just be in the moment and enjoy it.
Also, do the things that you were sent there to do because your company’s paying for it obviously, but there’s so much opportunity to learn from other people in, not just events, but in your current company. Like maybe I find we talked about Josh, I find Josh’s job very interesting. I might not ever go work in security and at this point probably I never will, but first I personally find security very interesting and the whys and hows of why security teams do certain things I find very interesting. So as I said earlier, every time I talk to them, I learn something and I feel like those experiences are A, they’re free and B, they’re relationship building for you within your company, outside of your own team. So Josh and I are not on the same team, but if I can go talk to him, I meet him in the hallway for 10 minutes, which I know I work from home, but I do go to the office sometimes and sometimes I’ll see him at the office or Noel, another former guest, same thing.
Go talk to them for 10 or 15 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever. Maybe have lunch with somebody that I don’t normally have lunch with and they’ll share things about what they’re doing and the way that they think about things and the way that maybe the company is making decisions. And all of those things help my brain and I consider them a part of learning. It’s all learning, like just figure it out. It doesn’t have to be go get another certification. I feel a certain way about certifications also, and I don’t remember if I’ve expressed it here. I’m sure that I have. I think that the knowledge is useful, but I don’t think a certification or a formal degree tell me anything about how you will work or if you even retained any of that knowledge. I used to be part of the hiring for my former job and I was the technical vetter.
That’s what I did. I vetted their technical skills for the engineers before they were hired. And so I was kind of the end of the line for a lot of people. You might have a college degree, but if I can’t get a feel for how you would walk me through a troubleshooting scenario or something like that, I’m trying to get a feel of how you would solve a problem without you directly parroting something you learned from a book. Because the real world isn’t that simple. And so I think that all of those things are really important and certifications are great, college degrees are great. As I mentioned earlier, they can help you get past recruiters, so if you’re trying to get a new job or you’re trying to get a promotion or anything like that, those can be really helpful for those things. And even if they’re not for me, they might be for you. Go for it. I’m not trying to disparage anyone. I personally do not think that they tell enough of a story for everyone though. And I’ve talked a lot again.
Sean Sebring:
It’s okay. And I think for the purposes of what we want to talk about today, it’s not about which piece of paper, which avenue, which route is the best. It’s about focusing on educating yourself and just the benefits to you as a person. One of the things that you brought up, I kind of brought up my Duolingo as what I do to kind of keep myself doing something and gamifying… Okay, let me put it this way. We’re talking about resources and there are so many resources out there right now, free resources, and they oftentimes or maybe ad sponsored for free and then you can go into paying for them, do that, try it, try something, do the free option and then if it starts to vibe with you, there’s no harm in investing in it because you’re not investing in a product or a company, you’re investing in yourself.
And of course there’s a product on the other side of that, but I feel like as consumers, we’re hesitant to be like, “Oh no, I’m going to be spending money on another app, another game.” It doesn’t have to be with a certification at the end. If it’s something that’s educating you and especially if it’s entertaining and educating you at the same time, don’t be shy and start free. Start free. The point is just don’t be shy about focusing on something that’s for your growth. And I suppose on the topic of resources, Chrystal, this could be a good one for us to kind of lean into that. You had mentioned earlier you had kind of jotted something down you wanted to bring up when it comes to what options, what resources are out there. Could you take us through that?
Chrystal Taylor:
Yeah, so I think that there’s a lot of different types of resources. There’s a lot of free stuff out there. I talked about it somewhere at some point in the last few years, but I’ve taken communication courses like how to improve your email communication skills and things like that when I first started working at SolarWinds. There’s lots of courses out there that are like that that are free through different websites. Maybe it was a promotional thing like you mentioned earlier. You start out free and then eventually you have to pay for it. So I did that course I think through Coursera, which is a paid resource, but at the time I think I did that course for free. And there’s a lot of those types of things out there that are free or they’ll have a special and they come around every once in a while you can look at stuff that are discounted.
Humble Bundle for instance, also does a lot of, occasionally they do book bundles of this is a cybersecurity book bundle. They’ll all be educational resources for cybersecurity learning or something like that and it’ll be 12 bucks or whatever. So there’s definitely cost-friendly resources if you’re going to be paying for it for yourself. I have in the past also done a Microsoft Bootcamp, which I did not do the certification for at the end. I just did the bootcamp because I needed to learn about Microsoft servers at the time, which was 2012 servers, which might be telling you for how long ago that was. But I think that all of these types of resources are really good. And if you’re looking for leaning into the technical side of things, I know that a lot of people swear by having the availability of a lab and I have done this, done kind of two ways where you have to host your own lab and sometimes that’s preferable because no one else can go mess with it and mess up whatever you’ve got going on.
Or if you’re lucky, you might have a lab that you can work within at work, there’ll be a company lab that you can go mess around with and that’s really helpful for things like when you’re trying to do a proof of concept for new software that you need to learn about before you can even consider implementing it. But it’s also really good for your own skills if you’re trying to learn things and there’s great lab software out there that is free like GNS3, which full disclosure is a SolarWinds product. But GNS3 is a great piece of software and I’ve used it before to learn about networking things because I will tell you of all the on-prem skills, networking is probably the thing I feel the weakest about. I find it very intimidating, like regex is a nightmare scenario to me. I never want to look at regex for instance.
There are specific technical things that I consider myself more of a generalist and networking is, for some reason, just terrifying for me. So I have used things like GNS3 to set up. You can use it to set up network devices and then you can learn how to monitor those things and that’s what I needed it for. But there are lots of people use those things to get Cisco certifications and things like that where they can have something to play around with that’s not going to break everybody else’s things. It’s not going to break your setup in your house. It’s just a lab. And if you can afford to have your own lab, great, and if you can’t afford to have your own lab, there are more cost-friendly lab options out there since you can do a lot of that virtual now. So think about those things.
Sean Sebring:
Asking is one of my favorite things too, ask questions. I know while we’re talking about continuing education, a mentor is a good part of it too because they can steer you. Sometimes you feel lost because there is so much to potentially learn out there, but if you know where you want to head, find someone there, just ask them questions. It doesn’t have to be an official mentorship. You don’t have to say, “Obi-Wan, teach me.” You could just say, “Hey, what would you recommend to someone in my position? What would you recommend I learn next?” And follow some of that guidance and just asking questions, ask peers what the answer is and not knowing is okay, seeking the answers is the important piece there.
Chrystal Taylor:
You mentioned something, and I know this episode isn’t about mentorship, but I do want to bring it up because I know you feel very strongly about it, but also because you were talking about finding someone to give you advice on what to study if you are overwhelmed because as I mentioned earlier, it’s never been easier to learn things, but also that means that there is so much out there that it can be overwhelming if you don’t have a direction. So what would you say you should do if there’s someone that has a job that you want to work towards? Is that a person that you would try to establish a mentorship with and then is that a better way to try and get that continuing education advice?
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, so mentorship feels super formal when you say it like that. I try and keep things… I don’t know, I’m just such a people person and who I am, I’ll accept it as a mentorship without having said, “Will you be my mentor?” But there have been times when I’ve said, “Hey, would you mind being a mentor for me in this subject, in this field?” But yeah, asking the question and it doesn’t have to be a formal thing, it can just be like, “Hey, would you mind if I started asking you some questions from time to time about this thing? I’m super interested in it and you kind of have some expertise there,” right? Again, you can keep the guardrails up from making it a formal mentorship, but there’s no shame in saying, “Hey, I respect where you’re at in this field,” and if it makes you feel more comfortable, put that specific framing around it.
“Hey, when it comes to this, would you be my cybersecurity mentor?” Right now they’re only your mentor for cybersecurity, so maybe you feel a little bit more secure. I know pride can come into these things. I really wish it didn’t because there’s no reason to feel any sense of shame. It’s saying you know a little bit more than me or maybe a lot more than me about a subject or topic and I want to grow there. In fact, I think the bigger person is the person that asks the question. So not being shy, not being afraid. And if you ask me, I would like to have many mentors and I feel I do because anybody who knows more than me on a topic is already my mentor whether we’ve established the relationship or not because if I need to ask you a question, you gave me guidance and what does a mentor do? It’s just to me, it can be as formal as you need it to or as informal as you need it to. Just don’t let it hold you back from learning and growing.
Chrystal Taylor:
That’s a really interesting perspective on mentorship. I don’t think of it in those terms personally, but I have one person that I consider to be a mentor to me, but I definitely think I learn a lot from other people like we’ve already established. I think that there are definitely people I respect that others have spent the time to learn something more than I have. I think that something that gets in a lot of people’s way is ego more than pride, where whatever hangups you might have might prevent you from asking someone who may know more than you or from admitting someone knows more than you, maybe it’s their personality you don’t jive with. Find somebody else. Legitimately, there are so many people out there. If you can’t get along with them, you’re not going to have a good relationship with whatever you learn from them either.
So you do need to take that into consideration if you’re going to learn from an individual. Even if it’s the online stuff like Twitch or YouTube or any of the virtual courses or whatever, if you’re not jiving with the way that they talk or the way that they teach, it doesn’t matter how good the course is. It doesn’t matter how many stars it’s been rated or how many people swear by it or whatever. If you’re having trouble with that aspect of it, just like what we were talking about earlier with fitness, if that way of working out doesn’t work for you, it’s just not going to work for you and it’s not exercise. The same thing is true I think for learning. If you don’t jive well with the way that they teach or the way that they talk, like I have a hard time with people who have more monotone voices.
It’s nothing against them. They might be saying the most interesting thing in the world and I will be falling asleep over here. I mean it’s not their fault, it’s nobody’s fault, but I recognize that that is not going to work the best for me. Or if it is, then I have to take it in smaller bites. I have to break it up further because I know I’m going to get bored and stop listening at some point. So maybe there’s some recognition of your own ability to learn there. I learn better by doing, personally. That’s how I learn. I learn better by doing, which is why I suggested the lab idea, being able to go mess around and play with stuff and I don’t have to worry about breaking stuff. That’s key for me learning things. I need to be able to do it. I need to physically be able to write stuff down.
I have to go rewrite an email or whatever, whatever the skill is that I’m working on. The first time I did a speaking engagement, I had to do it before I knew I could do it. And that’s a silly thing to say, but it is true. It’s how I learn. Until I do it the first time, I’m going to be freaking out 100% all the way up until I do it the first time. And it doesn’t matter if I spent a hundred hours learning about how to do this thing. Until I’ve done it the first time, my brain is like, “You don’t know how to do this.” And that’s just how my brain works.
Sean Sebring:
You know what’s so funny about that is I’m the same way when it comes to directions. If you drove me somewhere, there’s an 80 to 90% chance I’ll have no idea how to get back there because I was-
Chrystal Taylor:
Passenger princess.
Sean Sebring:
… zoned out doing my own thing. But if I drove there once, I can 80 to 90% guarantee I could get back there maybe without a map. And I agree as well. The hands-on, I vibe with that too. There’s two things I want to say is one, I agree when I’m training anybody, especially if there’s an opportunity for a lab to be present, I’ll say you follow along with everything that I’m doing because I’m not just trying to show you, building the muscle memory is doing both. You’re seeing and hearing as well as feeling what’s going on. And if your hands are acting in the motions that’s being presented, I think the retention is just so much better. And the other thing is you talked about being able to listen and learn from somebody, right? It’s going to vary. Don’t hate the game, hate the player.
It’s usually the other way around and you don’t have to hate anybody. The idea is if you’re super interested in a topic and you want to learn about it. To give an example, I study ITIL and I’ve taken many of their different branches and areas of study in it and there has been a instructor that I was like, “I am not learning well from this guy and I know I’m passionate about this topic. It’s this guy.” So if you have to adjust, that’s fine too. Don’t give up on the learning. Don’t give up on the fact that you think you’re still interested in it.
I agree with what you said there, and the biggest reason I emphasize what I did about the mentorship is because ego, pride, whichever however you want to perceive it or call it, is don’t be scared to ask questions. And I think trying to break it down from it doesn’t have to be a formal night ship where you take a knee, they dub you their apprentice. It can be as easy as someone you regularly reach out to and ask questions for and maybe even have a dose of admiration. Who knows?
Chrystal Taylor:
Well, and importantly, there are no stupid questions. I know that people say that a lot, but I actually think that if you think that’s true, then you’ll be much better off. You’ll learn so much more. Just ask whatever question comes in your head. Maybe you think it’s a dumb question. It doesn’t matter if you’ll learn from it. I do want to say too, on the flip side of what I was talking about earlier, you might really like an instructor and not be learning from them also. I have a story to go with this. In high school I took one physics class and I can tell you right now, I don’t know jack about physics. I learned absolutely nothing in that class, but that teacher was one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met in my life. He was so fun and he had the most interesting stories.
He had done so many things in his life. He was already 75 when he was my teacher. He had been a singer for the Boston Symphony and he worked on the team that invented graphing calculators and he worked on the team that invented night vision goggles. And he was the most interesting person and very interesting to talk to. And he had great stories and we did fun experiments in the physics part of things. But I could not tell you a single thing about actual physics that I learned from him. When we had to do tests and stuff, I did very poorly. I had to get my friend to teach me from the book because I could not learn anything that we were supposed to be learning from him.
But I loved him as an individual and I think that that is still true in real life. If you’re having too good of a time and you’re not picking up any of the fundamentals, maybe recognize that you just want to be that person’s friend and you’re not going to learn anything from them. I just think that that’s another way to look at it. It doesn’t mean anything negative about the relationship, it just means maybe they’re not teaching in a way that you can process, but the person is still good, the person’s still good.
Sean Sebring:
I appreciate the devil’s advocate there because that’s probably not something that’s commonly observed. You overlook it. And before we move to our next topic, I did want to pick on you a little bit that maybe that’s why you and physics don’t get along and you’re as clumsy as you are because when you had the opportunity… Anyway, we can move on now.
Chrystal Taylor:
I was already clumsy even before that.
Sean Sebring:
Okay. But I think a good closing topic for takeaway for the listeners today is what do you recommend that we focus on? If we’re going to talk about continual education in ’25 and beyond, what do we think are some good things to keep an eye on and check out?
Chrystal Taylor:
Well, on the non-tech side, I think that communication skills are something that people should always be working on. You mentioned earlier that it’s kind of an always-evolving topic, just like tech skills really are. And I think that that is very true. The way that we communicate changes as our society changes, what becomes acceptable or not acceptable changes over time. We see it throughout history. So how many people are disparaging of their grandparents or something like, “Oh, that’s just grandma. She doesn’t know how to talk,” or whatever. But these are things that you can improve and learn on over time. And I think that improving your communication skills outside of whatever technical skills that you have can really make a difference in your career and it might surprise you into moving to a space that you didn’t think you’d move into. Like I work in marketing now, never thought that was going to happen.
Not a career goal that I had for myself when I was younger, but it is a thing that I do enjoy. Obviously I’m here, but I wouldn’t have expected it. And I think that those interpersonal skills and non-technical skills, which are sometimes more difficult to learn, are things that you should always be working on. And communication is one of those. If you can improve the way that you communicate with your end users or your customers or your boss or your executives or whoever it is that you’re communicating with on a regular basis, your colleagues, it builds those relationships better and it only improves the way that you work.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, no, I couldn’t agree more. To me, they’re similar to those ones that we all roll our eyes at, which are your HR courses or your security courses even, which we’ve talked about those. Just because you had the skill once doesn’t mean it’s still relevant or maybe you are a little rusty. I have a term that I used when I was in a role for a while that I had gotten comfortable in. I felt like I was getting dull, and sometimes you just have to hone the blade a little bit. So I was like, “Man, I feel like I’m not getting anywhere,” but the job was going well. It’s just like I need to feel sharp again, which is why I use the knife reference there. It’s like I want to feel sharp again. So let me get into some education. Let me feel like I’m refreshed in my field, my genre, let me learn something new because if work’s going good and you start to feel dull, well, take that opportunity.
That’s a great place to be in your work. If things are going well, but you feel like you’re not going anywhere, go somewhere without having to go anywhere. Take yourself on a quick educational journey. Yeah, another good one. I know we’re both agreeing on this one and you did say it before the episode, is to do with AI. AI will never not be in an episode, I feel like, for the next several years and beyond. But yeah, AI is just everywhere right now and there’s so much to learn about it from so many different angles from prompt engineering, basically knowing how to use it to its best capabilities, ask it the question to get the best possible answer for yourself. The ethics side of things, the legal side of things I think is super fascinating right now because that’s not even close to being fully fleshed and designed right?
What does it mean to have AI where it can read everything and then it can provide legal responses? And is that something that should be held in the court? Is it my new lawyer? You know what, it’s very tricky. So AI I think is a super fun area for you to educate yourself in because one, it’s still growing and you have a chance to try and grow with it rather than try and play super catch in 2028 when we’re all with our robot buddies that are AI. Anyway, so you have an opportunity to grow with it instead of playing catch up on it and get ahead of some things because relevance, we talked about a lot throughout today’s episode and many of our episodes. AI is only going to continue to become more relevant. And so I think it’s a great place to put your attention.
Chrystal Taylor:
I think that there’s a lot of reason to go that way. I mean, well, we talk about it in upcoming episode where it’s getting more into prompt engineering and kind of AI in general. And I think one of the things that is interesting is where before we might’ve said, “Go learn a coding language,” or something like that. I’m not really sure that’s true anymore. It is still helpful in some ways, but I don’t know how long it’ll continue to be helpful. And that’s kind of the question, the way when you’re trying to learn new skills. I think you should go learn something that you find interesting. And it doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be super relevant for right now, not technical skills, but I know that there are quite a few people that work in IT that their hobbies all are something that are completely unplugged.
They learn how to do blacksmithing or they learn how to do carpentry or they learn how… They make stuff with their hands. And you have to learn skills for that. And I think that that is also super relevant and it changes your mindset in what you’re doing. So getting yourself outside of it can also be helpful. We are in an era of overwhelming information and overwhelmingly online. And so that is just healthy I think for your brain is when you can take a step out of it and go learn something that is tangible and requires you to use your physical person to do something can also be really helpful for you as you do anything else, right?
Sean Sebring:
So satisfying too.
Chrystal Taylor:
It is satisfying. Yeah, it’s just one of those things I think that… So we’ve talked about we have kids, right? And sometimes they force you to go learn something new because… Like I can’t tell you how many times I had to relearn math so I could help my kid with his homework or whatever. I swear for three or four years in a row was a different way to learn math and they had to do math in that new specific way. And I’m like, why? Because there’s a meme out there. Math is math from I think The Incredibles, but I think that is also a good thing if you have kids that they can challenge your perceptions.
They can challenge the things that you know because they want to learn something or they want to go do something and you need to learn about it in order to keep them safe or in order to make sure that they’re not getting into something they shouldn’t be getting into or whatever. So you get to learn about those things too, and maybe you find something interesting out of that. But I think that the key in general for me is just to not stop learning. You talked earlier about feeling dull and I was over here nodding because I agree completely even when you’re successful in your role and things are going well. And I said it a year or two ago in a meeting where I was like, “I feel like a tool that’s not being used.” And I feel like that goes the same way as the honing a knife situation.
I felt like I was languishing in my technical education, so I was like, “I got to do something about this. I got to go mess with something. I got to go poke my fingers in pies and figure out what I’m going to be doing.” Because the same thing can happen. Everyone has the slumps that they go through where they’re not feeling great about what they’re doing. And maybe that’s because work isn’t going great, but maybe work is fine and you just aren’t enjoying it anymore.
And it goes back to what I said earlier in that there’s always something new going on in tech. So if you’re not enjoying it anymore, spend some time figuring out what might be interesting. I think AI is not going away anytime soon and anyone who thinks that it is, is fooling themselves. Whatever aspects you choose to study and learn about AI will only help you. And finding new and inventive ways to use AI to take over mundane tasks, I think are always going to be welcome. So get yourself out of your own head. Think about how AI could possibly help you in whatever you have to do every day that you hate. Maybe that’s a place to start.
Sean Sebring:
So there’s two things I want to say and then I’m going to ask you if you have one last one before we close out. One of them, I didn’t mean to bring up until you just said this, was definitely use AI to learn. That’s kind of obvious, we should all be doing that, but I forgot one of the first things I started using ChatGPT for was I would be doing crosswords, and sometimes I’m like, “I swear you made up that word. I swear you made up that word.” So immediately I would go into a chat AI and I’d say, “Give me the definition. Okay, use it in a sentence, use it in another sentence.” And it was just like me having a conversation like-
Chrystal Taylor:
I still don’t believe you.
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, I still don’t think that’s a word, but whatever. But it was a really good way for me to learn because I’m like, “Okay, well now I know that’s a word I guess,” but yeah, and AI is so cool for that because you can just… It’s hopefully, unless it’s actually intelligent, unbiased, and not judging you and just use it to learn. It’s so quick and handy to just… You want to learn about something in 1 minute, 30 seconds, 20 seconds? Go for it. Not where I intended to go, but-
Chrystal Taylor:
I’ll tack onto that though. Trust but verify.
Sean Sebring:
Well, yes.
Chrystal Taylor:
Because there are definitely plenty of stories out there where the AI is returning things that are incorrect.
Sean Sebring:
Have you ever spelled strawberry? Just if you don’t know what I’m talking about.
Chrystal Taylor:
How many R’s are in strawberry?
Sean Sebring:
Yeah, how many R’s are in strawberry? There’s a fun AI conversation around that, so check it out. But no, the last piece of what would I recommend for an education to check out that again, I think is one of those skills you need to sharpen every now and then is leadership. And it doesn’t mean you have to be a manager or think of yourself as a leader because whether you are an individual contributor, no matter what level you’re at, the skills that you can learn from this are huge and it’ll teach you a few things. One, how you can be a part of the dynamic, not as a manager, but more so what you should be expecting and accountable from your management, and again, how they should be treating you I think is very important. And they’re also just skills that will elevate you to a level if you’re in the pursuit of moving into leadership, being able to have those skills is also good.
But I like to think of any role I’m in. I want to be a leader even as an individual contributor where I’m only responsible for my own work. I want to be in such a place that if someone says, “Hey, Sean, I have a question for you.” They’re doing it continuously because they’re looking to me as a leader in whatever I do. So that’s just, again, it’s a skill that needs to stay sharp. There’s lots of cool parts about leadership, whether it’s delegation coaching, and again, those don’t have to mean management. So there’s stigmas around management and leadership and thinking it means someone’s above you and instead, I think leadership doesn’t have to mean above you. It could just be an inspirational or someone you think is, again, you have a nice dose of admiration for them.
Chrystal Taylor:
I like that a lot. I think I just want to leave it with, as you learn things and as you learn new skills, even if you’re learning something out of spite, you really don’t like the way somebody handled something, and so you’re like, “I’m going to learn…”
Sean Sebring:
I like that crossword puzzle answer.
Chrystal Taylor:
Listen, it’s a great motivator even if you learned it because you don’t like the way someone did something so next time you’re just going to do it yourself or whatever the case may be, try to remember that there are still people that know more than you. So even if you learned how to do a thing, that’s not the only way to do that thing. Don’t get too inside your own head, but keep an open mind. I think that that is generally all I think about for learning and constantly keeping up new skills and especially interpersonal skills. It’s keeping up just an open mind and trying to understand the way that people think about things will only help you because at the end of the day, even if AI takes over and we’re all out of our jobs and all tech is run by AI, which is like, I don’t know, some dream, some nightmare scenario.
Sean Sebring:
Thought you were going to say, “Which is like, I don’t know, two years from now?”
Chrystal Taylor:
I don’t think that we’re that close to that. I think that AI still needs people and we’re not in a place where that’s gone yet. But I do think that if the nightmare scenario happens, we’re all not working. People still need people. So even if you have to go learn new skills, like learning how to work with people or how to communicate with people appropriately is a skill that never goes out of style and is always evolving. So even if you decide, “You know what? Screw this tech biz, I’m going to go start a farm in the middle of nowhere.” That’s a common meme that happened over the last couple of years since the pandemic. People just wanted to unplug. I think that the more online we are, the more that people feel that way, especially if they work in online positions. And so even if you do that, you still have to interact with people. So consider working on interpersonal skills at the very least. If you don’t want to continue your technical education journey, work on your people skills. Those are good skills to have.
Sean Sebring:
Such a hoot as expected, Chrystal, love it.
Chrystal Taylor:
I have opinions.
Sean Sebring:
This has been a really fun episode, and I had been thinking about this one and Chrystal and I had been talking about having an episode like this for a while with just the two of us because it’s fun to talk about what you’re passionate about and Chrystal clearly has a lot of passion about this, and I think it’s important for everybody to recognize, “Hey, I should focus on me sometimes.” And a lot of the stuff we focus on is about a work-related topic. So it doesn’t have to be about work. It can be about just you growing you.
Chrystal Taylor:
I will say too, talking about motivators for learning, I said spite earlier is a good motivator, but I also think that it is very satisfying when you supersede someone’s expectations of what you’re going to know. So when you surprise someone by knowing how to do something because they didn’t think you knew how to do that, also very satisfying. Take your wins. Let’s all add to that of if you learn something new, you could maybe surprise someone, get some satisfaction out of that.
Sean Sebring:
I never thought Chrystal was a teacher’s pet. Now I know. So we can call it, “Oh yeah, good job Chrystal.”
Chrystal Taylor:
Are you kidding, Sean? I was a teacher’s assistant in middle school.
Sean Sebring:
Oh my gosh.
Chrystal Taylor:
And a principal’s assistant in high school.
Sean Sebring:
There we go. Well, now you have it. You. You’re a Chrystal Taylor.
Chrystal Taylor:
That’s me. Everybody’s learning about me today.
Sean Sebring:
Well, as I expected, I had a ton of fun chatting about this with you, Chrystal, and it’s really fun just to have the two of us chatting about stuff we’re passionate about. So I really appreciated that. And thank you listeners for joining us on another episode of SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Sean Sebring, and of course, joined by my fellow host, Chrystal Taylor. If you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.
