I was explaining my career progression to a new mentee recently, someone new to IT, and it got me thinking about how, early in life, it can be unclear how someone might transition through multiple jobs or careers. For many, these transitions are driven by interest, necessity such as being laid off, or a drive to succeed and earn more money. That desire to make more money isn’t just about greed; it’s a mix of ambition, pride, passion, skill, self-worth, and necessity, especially if you are providing for others.
Looking back at my own journey, I can see all of these influences at play. But I also notice a flow of continuity from one role to the next. I’m sharing this not to reflect on my past, but to illustrate how someone might navigate their own career transitions and find their next big adventure.
I’ve been working since my early teens in one capacity or another. I started with odd jobs like mowing lawns, delivering newspapers, and detasseling corn. My parents encouraged this work ethic, though not out of necessity. That early exposure led to high school jobs, mostly as a cook in various restaurants, with a little construction work on the side. I think it’s unfortunate that many young people miss out on these experiences today, though, in hindsight, I might have benefited from focusing more on school and enjoying my youth. I grew up believing hard work was the only path, but my wife and sons later helped me see the value of balancing discipline with enjoying the journey. My kids had so many homework assignments and extracurricular activities that there were fewer safe work opportunities for them, but I digress.
I don’t claim my experience was better than anyone else’s, but I did learn to enjoy working, to stay focused for long periods, and to pay attention to detail. I enjoyed reading, mechanical work, and taking things apart to understand how they functioned. I even spent some time as a facility maintenance worker at a private cargo plane hangar.
The point is, I knew how to work hard, I liked to read, I liked mechanical work, I didn’t mind physical labor, and I had exposure to a few industries including agriculture, restaurants, construction, and mechanics. After high school, I needed to figure out my next step. At the time, I didn’t realize it, but those experiences laid the foundation for what came next, and the pattern continued. Your foundation is likely different, but it probably shaped your career progression in a similar way.
After high school, I joined the Air Force as an aircraft mechanic. At the time, it felt like a random choice, but looking back, it made sense given my interests and background. I was a good fit for the role. I sometimes wonder if I had ended up in a job I wasn’t suited for, would I have had the awareness to pivot to something else?
While working as an aircraft mechanic, I stumbled onto college. Someone mentioned that if I wanted to meet people in my small Air Force town, I should take some classes at the local university. My father had a background in computers, and I had grown up around them long before most households had one, so I started taking classes on the side and got hooked.
Eventually, I left the military to work in IT, starting in desktop support. As I finished my degree, I moved into server support. Then I landed on a server support team for a big company and got pulled into operational monitoring, maintaining and tuning the systems that alert operations teams when an outage occurs. At one point, I almost took a major career detour into insurance, but I realized I was veering too far off course. Instead, I transitioned into cybersecurity, which was quite similar to operational monitoring except instead of looking for service outages, I was tracking cyber threats. That, in turn, led me into big data, data science, and artificial intelligence.
To sum this up, my intent here isn’t to tell my life story or suggest that my path is the one others should follow. My point is that, looking back, I can now see a clear path that once felt uncertain and unknowable. If I could offer advice to my younger self, setting aside lottery numbers and Bitcoin predictions, it would be this:
Let your past experiences and abilities, no matter how unrelated they might seem, help guide your next career move. Push for a meaningful change every five to ten years. Ask yourself what you are good at today and look for correlations between your current skill set and a new career path that builds on what you have already done. Like a plant growing around an obstacle, don’t try to uproot yourself entirely. Transitions often start with education, expressing your intentions to others, understanding that planned transitions take time, being open to pivoting if needed, and remembering that sometimes, rapid change is thrust upon us whether we are ready or not (so it is always good to be thinking about the next big leap).
