Career Downloads

Show Notes

What does it take to go from a curious kid tinkering with an Apple IIe computer to leading cybersecurity at a major university? Vito Rocco’s journey offers a masterclass in career development, strategic thinking, and the power of continuous learning.

Currently serving as Chief Information Security Officer at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Vito brings a unique perspective shaped by small-town Pennsylvania roots, military service, and the challenging world of higher education cybersecurity. His story demonstrates how curiosity, adaptability, and strong communication skills can transform a career trajectory.

Episode Highlights:

The Foundation Years: Discover how summer access to his teacher-father’s Apple IIe computer sparked a lifelong passion for technology, leading to building computers in high school and becoming the go-to tech person among peers.

Military Transformation: Learn why Vito chose military service over traditional college, his initial role in artillery, and the strategic decision to reclassify into cybersecurity during the field’s early expansion.

Skills Development: Understand the value of military training programs, the importance of certifications, and how hands-on experience with different cybersecurity domains shaped his expertise.

Higher Education Challenges: Get insider perspective on the unique security challenges universities face, balancing academic freedom with protection, and why traditional corporate security approaches don’t always work in educational settings.

Leadership Evolution: Explore the transition from technical expert to organizational leader, including the communication skills required to influence without authority and build support for security initiatives.

Career Advice: Gain practical insights on the importance of IT fundamentals, the value of professional networking, and why understanding business context is essential for cybersecurity success.

Vito’s journey illustrates that there’s no single path to cybersecurity leadership. Whether you’re starting in military service, traditional IT roles, or considering a career change, this conversation provides actionable insights for building expertise and advancing your career in the rapidly expanding cybersecurity field.

TranscriptionManuel: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their background, their experiences, and really what got them interested in technology and how they managed to navigate their career over time. For today’s episode, I have with me Vito Rocco. So I’m pretty excited about this one. So he is a CISO for UNLV and we’ll get into that conversation but a lot of his background, just the way that he navigated and eventually got into that type of role, I think is very interesting. So I’m looking forward to this conversation. And with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Vito. How’s it going?

Vito: Great, thanks for having me.

Manuel: I appreciate you coming on and being able to share your experiences.

Vito: Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad to be here.

Manuel: So if you don’t mind, just kind of summarize for us and kind of give us some of your background is kind of where you grew up. And then we’ll kind of follow that story into what got you into technology.

Vito: So I grew up in Pennsylvania, little town north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I’m the oldest of six kids. I have five brothers and sisters. And so grew up in a big family. And I sort of always had an interest in technology growing up. These were the days before every household had a computer. But my dad was a teacher. And so he had a computer in his classroom and every summer he got to bring home the computer. And so we had this, it was an Apple IIe computer that was sort of my first intro to technology or IT. And every summer we got to spend a lot of time, mostly playing games, but also I learned a little bit of BASIC, the coding language BASIC on there. And just a little bit about general, in general how to use a computer and how to navigate file systems and things like that, using the five and a quarter inch floppy disks. (both laughing) Yeah. Yeah, so that was kind of my start into it. And we had that computer every summer and my brothers and sisters and I spent a lot of hours on that sort of navigating it.

Manuel: And it’s funny because it probably at that time, it’s something fun, it’s something new, but especially at that time with computers being new, it wasn’t really like, oh, there’s a career in this. So it’s just, you’re just curious and you’re learning that. And I’m sure at some point you’re also, because it sounds, I remember my kind of first experiences with computers too when I got to school, like I remember the Oregon Trail. So like, you had the computer class and you were doing a lot of that.

Vito: Absolutely.

Manuel: It wasn’t a career, but you enjoyed that. And then, that was your first introduction. What kind of transpired from there?

Vito: Yeah, so I mean, I continued to want to learn about it. Like you said, at the time, I wasn’t really thinking of it as a career field or something to do for a living, but it was something that intrigued me and interests me. And so, I wanted to get more into it. And so, using and learning more about the computers. And like, it’s funny you mentioned the Oregon Trail. I just said, I said the other day to my wife, look, you weren’t a kid in the eighties if you didn’t die of dysentery at least once, right? We all died of dysentery at least once. But yeah, things like that were, sort of held my interest around it. And I, maybe I didn’t even realize at the time that I was sort of learning about technology at the same time while playing these entertaining games and these interesting games. And so, from there, as I got older, I sort of kept that interest and that want to learn more about technology. And I started building my own computers in high school, the early days of high school. And I sort of became the tech guy that people would come to and ask questions like, oh, we don’t know how to do this on the computer. Let’s ask Vito about it. And that sort of thing. So I sort of evolved and just kept being intrigued by technology and by computers and kept learning more and more from there.

Manuel: And the need or the want to kind of build computers, was it, did you, I’ve had different people give me different stories. Was it, I wanted something better and faster? Was it really, I just want to see how this works?

Vito: Yeah, it was more the latter for me. Like I want to know how it works, how all the pieces go together, how these things interact with each other. Sort of that like MacGyver mindset. You’ve watched the TV show MacGyver probably, you’re about the same generation as me. So knowing the science behind things and how things work and how you can put different things together to do something that maybe they weren’t intended to do. But I had that same intrigue with computers, like how do all these parts work together? How do I put them together and get them to work the way I want them to work?

Manuel: Obviously just curiosity is helping build this. You’re continuing to go to school at some point. Like you said, we’re probably around the same generation. At one point, it almost starts to become kind of a requirement. Probably around high school time, like you have to, they want your papers typed. So you’ve got to print them out and do a lot of that. What did you think, at least around the high school age, what did you think that you were gonna do? Because again, technology was not it. This is a tool, it’s a fun thing to do. You’re curious, but what did you think was gonna happen?

Vito: Yeah, at that point in my life, I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And in the later days of high school, I started looking toward the military, which is where I ended up going eventually. But I didn’t even know then that I would have a career in technology or that I wanted a career in technology. I was thinking about a lot of different career fields in the military and thought about things like the cool jobs that everybody wants to do, special operations or something like that. And I wasn’t really sure how I would make a career out of that military training or service after the military. I wasn’t at the point of even thinking about that yet. But I ended up going into the military and I actually enlisted not in a technical field at all. I enlisted in the field artillery field and I was a forward observer for field artillery for a while. And so I was in there for a couple of years and did some time in that career field and then I had a chance to reclassify. And like I said, this interest I had always had in technology sort of led me to reclassify into a tech field in the military.

Manuel: And during that time, that reclassification process, is it, are they posting jobs? I’m vaguely familiar with how it works. A lot of times there’s like contract terms, right? Like your artillery for, let’s say a four year period and then you can reclassify, right? Is it something similar to that?

Vito: Yeah, so a lot of it is based on contract terms. A lot of it’s also based on the needs in the military and certain career fields are higher need or they have trouble getting more people for that. Certain career fields, you have to have a certain ASVAB score, which is the test we all take to get into the military. You have to have a certain level of ASVAB score and so it’s harder to get more people into those career...

Show Notes

What happens when the interviewer becomes the interviewee? In this special episode, John MacGugan flips the script and puts Manuel Martinez in the hot seat to uncover the real story behind Career Downloads.

Episode Summary:

This conversation reveals the honest struggles of podcast creation: the learning curve, the costs, the family time sacrificed, and the reality checks that almost ended everything at the six-month mark. Manuel also shares his ambitious plans for taking the show on the road and expanding beyond the tech industry.

What You’ll Learn:

Key Topics Discussed:

Episode Timestamps:

Guest Information:

Resources Mentioned:

Connect & Continue the Conversation:

Next Episode Preview:

Transcription

Manuel: So welcome everyone. This is Manuel Martinez with a mini teaser for the Career Downloads podcast. Normally I bring on a different guest, you know, I hit the refresh button, but this time we’re gonna do something a little different. It’s gonna be a big refresh where we’re basically, I have a guest that’s gonna go through and ask me some questions focused around the podcast and kind of how it came about. Cause it’s one of the things that, you know, he realized and has brought to my attention that a lot of people don’t know how this came about. So I thought it’d be a great opportunity to kind of put myself in the hot seat. So with that, I’ll introduce John MacGugan and he can take it from here.

John:: Manuel Martinez, how are you doing?

Manuel: I’m doing well.

John:: So the tables have turned and now I get to ask you the questions. So I asked to be able to come here and do this real quick because I am a huge fan of the Career Downloads podcast. The reason why I’m a big fan of it is because every time I listen to one of your interviews, I learn something. And I don’t just learn something that I don’t know, I learn something that I can actually take and apply to my own career, which I know obviously is the intent of the podcast is to help those in the community. So I wanna learn a little bit more about the podcast itself and I have five burning questions for you. So here’s the first question, a little wordy, but we’ll get to it. So there are millions of podcasts out there and yours is one of them. But this obviously started with an idea that you had. You’re just a guy with a family, living in your house, doing your job. And now you’re doing a podcast at the time of this, 40 plus interviews. And so how did the idea of doing a podcast start with you?

Manuel: So the idea came about actually with a good friend of mine. So Jake Izumi, I will make sure that he gets credit for coming up with this, even though I know he’s gonna shy away. But I have been a part-time instructor for about seven years now. And in the last few years, I got into mentorship, formal mentorship programs at the my places of employment. And Jake actually got me introduced to an external one and it’s called the Women’s Empowerment Institute. So what they do is they take women who are re-entering the career field or maybe they’re transitioning, they put them through an AWS bootcamp and then they pair them up with an AWS mentor to help them on, it could be anything from earning a certification to helping them prepare for job interviews, to developing hands-on skills. And in our conversations with our mentees, you know, we run into issues. He had a mentee that he wasn’t sure how to kind of help her in what she was looking for. She had gone through the bootcamp. She was struggling with the, she understood the concepts, but getting that hands-on knowledge, she was struggling. So I had suggested, and if you review episode number two with Janetta Dunbar, she talks about buying a Udemy course, going through it and learning how everything was built and then tweaking it to her liking and that ended up landing her job with Sony PlayStation. So I gave him a condensed version of that, said, “Hey, why don’t you, you know the technology, you know what would work, find her a course that’s 10 bucks to build a basic website, but that has AWS technology on the backend.” He was like, “That’s a great idea. How did you come up with that?” Well, I happen to know part of that story from Janetta. Time goes on, there was another situation and I’ll kind of summarize it here, but same thing. I gave him another piece of advice and he was like, “Man, is that something you did?” I was like, “No, as a matter of fact, my friend, John: did that.” And eventually he said, “You need to find a way to amplify this information.” So we brainstormed, me and him would meet monthly, you know, during our work hours and we tried, well, maybe blogs, maybe writing it down, at some point he said, maybe create a video explaining what you’re telling me, but it didn’t feel right because it’s not my story, right? I didn’t go through those experiences and eventually he came up with the idea and kind of jointly is like, “Well, let’s do a podcast.” And I asked him to join me in building this and he wanted nothing to do with it. So then I was like, “Well, I’m not gonna do this on my own, similar to what you said. There’s a number of podcasts out there. Somebody’s already doing something similar. They have to be.” And I couldn’t find anything.

John:: I couldn’t either.

Manuel: The ones I did find had CEOs, CIOs, right? Like Mark Cuban. And I felt like the issue there is sometimes people can’t relate. Where as with you and me, like, “Oh, this is just a regular person that is going through their career. This is their experience.” And I wanted to find people in diverse industries, diverse roles, diverse, you know, different stages in their career so that they could go through and there’s gonna be somebody that they identify with, somebody that they resonate with. There’s gonna be a piece of their story that’s gonna say, “Man, that’s, I get that. Oh, they can do it. I can do it as well.” So that’s eventually what led to the idea. And, you know, eventually I slowly started to make it a reality.

John:: Look, if you can nail down Mark Cuban for an interview, I would take it. But one of the things that I like about the Career Downloads podcast is that it is normal, real people. It’s their stories. It’s where they started, how they develop their skills, and how they utilize those. So kudos to you because I listen to a lot of podcasts because I travel by vehicle for a living and it’s what I do to pass the time. So again, great. It’s a great idea. And I believe that so far the success has been amazing. My next question for you is about the ride on the podcast. So if you consider the podcast like a car, how was the ride in the car when you started? And how is that ride today? Meaning the road might’ve been bumpy a few places, but so what have you learned and how have you grown? Do you be as specific or as general as you want, but?

Manuel: So I’ll say that using that analogy to start off, it was smooth as far as production goes. It was li...

Show Notes

Why it matters: John MacGugan built a 25-year satellite technology career without a college degree, proving that curiosity and initiative can overcome traditional barriers.

The journey: Starting in a phone company mail room in 1989, John worked his way up through voicemail systems, satellite installation, and business ownership before landing at DirecTV as a traveling engineer.

Key turning points:– Fixed accounting errors in the mail room, making it profitable for the first time– Missed Amazon stock options in 1997 but learned about diversifying skills– Lost his satellite business in the 2008 housing crash, forcing a move to Texas– Became a LinkedIn content creator during the pandemic

What you’ll learn:– How technical skills transfer across different technologies– Why “it’s not who you know, it’s who knows you” for networking– Four principles for sustained career success– How to bounce back from business failures

Breaking news: John announces his upcoming book on brand ambassadorship, combining his engineering expertise with content creation experience.

Bottom line: John’s story shows how continuous learning, authentic relationships, and calculated risks can build a resilient tech career even without traditional credentials.

Guest: John MacGugan, DirecTV Engineer and LinkedIn content creator, based in Kansas City, Missouri

Connect: Follow John MacGugan on LinkedIn for satellite technology and professional development insightshttps://www.linkedin.com/in/john-macgugan/

Career Downloads features real stories from technology professionals about career pivots, lessons learned, and practical growth advice.

TranscriptionManuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their experiences and their career to help you as you’re managing your own career. For today’s episode, I have with me John MacGugan. John and I actually have never worked together. I met him when I was actually purchasing my first motorcycle. He was very knowledgeable, very helpful, so he answered a lot of questions. We spend a lot of time together, just understanding the motorcycle and through that process, we started talking about what we did for a living and eventually connected on LinkedIn and have maintained a relationship over that time. So I’m very excited. We’re gonna talk a little bit more about what he does, but he actually happened to be in town and I thought it was the perfect opportunity to bring him on and have him as a guest. So with that, I’ll introduce John.

Johh: Hey, how are you?

Manuel: Good.

John: I’m excited to be here, thank you.

Manuel: And I’m glad that you’re able to come on. We’ve talked about it a little bit before about kind of your experiences. So I knew just a short period of kind of what you’re doing now and what you were doing when I was working together, but I’m excited to kind of go through the whole experience.

John: Before I do that, I’ll just say I’m a huge fan of the Career Downloads podcast. I love the interviews and the reason why I like it is because every time I listen to an interview, I learn something. And there are a bunch of podcast style interview shows that are out there in the marketplace where you walk away after an hour or two, you don’t learn anything. And I’m in a place in my life where I wanna learn skills, I wanna learn what other people have done in their lives, take those lessons, apply into my own life, my career, and you have a great platform to do that. So it’s an honor to be here, thank you.

Manuel: Thank you, I appreciate it. And I’m glad that even somebody like yourself who’s kind of managed your career and is still finding value out of it.

John: Yeah, absolutely. So I work for DirecTV, nine years, about the time this goes live, it’ll be nine years, but I’ve had 25 years in the DBS industry, direct broadcast satellite industry. This is my third stint with DirecTV, but the first as an actual employee, as a contractor for a number of years. My specific job is engineering. I’m an engineer with DirecTV. My core duty is to make sure that local channel contributions to DirecTV are always up and always running in the Midwest of the US. I’ve got 20 designated market areas throughout the Midwest. I’m based out of Kansas City, Missouri, right in the heart of America. And I travel every week of the year. It’s either preventative maintenance, break fix maintenance, channel changes, FCC related work, whatever it takes. I’ve got a great group of guys we’re all spread out around the country and that’s what we do. But I have some deep ties to Las Vegas, even though I’m not here now. And it was interesting driving through today because this is the first time that I’ve been here in 10 years where I’ve actually taken a minute to look back. Come to trade shows, conventions, one here last week, but you’re always looking forward like here at the now. I forget, I lived here for 17 years. And you’re talking about my career, I’m looking back and I’m like, “Oh boy, I had a lot of memories here, a lot of memories.” So it is great to be back for a couple of days.

Manuel: That’s awesome. And I’m glad that you kind of had the opportunity to take a moment and just kind of sit there and reflect. I mean, a lot of times we are, we’re go, go, go. Here’s what’s happening in the future. I need to take care of this, but sitting back and saying, “Wow, look at what’s changed.” And like where I’ve come from when I left to coming back now 10 years later.

John: It’s not the same Las Vegas I left 10 years ago. So it’s a lot of construction. There’s a NFL stadium over there that wasn’t here last time I was here.

Manuel: And a hockey team and pretty soon a baseball team.

John: Yep, crazy.

Manuel: So now if you don’t mind, just like we do with all the other guests, just kind of give us a little bit of background of kind of where you grew up and then eventually what got you started in, I know that you’re not a directly in technology, like in a traditional sense with most of the guests, but there is that tie-in and you’re more the engineer. So just kind of your background and eventually how you got started in your field.

John: I did start in IT actually. I’m born and raised in the Seattle, Washington area, Pacific Northwest, went to public high school there. We did trimesters in Washington state, not semesters. So it was broken up into threes. And by the third trimester of my senior year, I had enough credits to graduate. So I went to college early, went to a small state college, literally right up the street from my high school. So I’d go to high school for an hour or two, then I’d go to college. And I was the youngest person there. I still lived at home. I was still in, if you will, the high school mentality, but I was going to college and it was too soon. I didn’t understand what college was when I originally went there. I didn’t understand principally the core thought of critical thinking, which is a lot of what college is. High school was all about academics. You read a book, you write a book report, they make sure you read the book, you understood it. College was a whole different scenario and I didn’t understand that. So when I graduated from high school, I told my dad, I said, dad, I was all freaked out. I just, I don’t know if I’m gonna make a commitment to do this. I don’t know what I wanna do with my life, but I gotta go find a job. And my father was an officer with the phone company, Pacific Northwest Bell, US West, and it was Quest and now I think it’s Lumen. And he made a call and got me my first job in the mail room of the phone company, Downtown Seattle in the basement. So 18, 19 years old, I got up every morning, moved to Seattle from my hometown, 60 miles away, get up every morning and would go to the mail room and from eight to 10 a.m. we would sort mail. You’re gonna love this. The mail was inner company, 11 by 17 legal manila envelopes with the little tie strap on the end and 18,000 boxes on it. And you put the address and the person in the box and when you get the mail, you scratch it off, then you resend it and you do the next person. We would get all that mail and we would sort it and we’d be done by 10 o’clock in the morning. Because there was nothing else to do in the mail room, it was also the forms distribution warehouse for the phone company. So you think about this, if you want a half day off or you need anything from human resources, you go to Infor, Workday, whatever platform you’re using, you fill it out, you send an email to the boss and you’re done. When I started in the workforce, you had to fill out a form and not just a piece of paper, a three tiered carbon copy form, one for you, one for the boss and one that got mailed in to HR. And there were probably a hundred thousand of these forms that would be needed to just do the daily function of work. In our mail room was a library, but instead of books, it had brown boxes with the fronts missing and little numbers on them in each box were the forms. So we would get mail in the morning and we’d open up the envelope and it would be a form with an order form for more forms. So all the different divisions in 13 states could do their work. So we would spend the day and we would fill out these orders and we’d put them back in the envelope, so scratch it off and mail it out. This is how I got into IT. Before the order went out, you had to give them a receipt. So we had an IBM computer, not on a network, a standalone ...

Show Notes

What if moving 18 times before your 18th birthday could become your greatest career asset? In this conversation, Jessica Parker reveals how early life challenges shaped an unshakeable approach to career resilience that’s kept her employed for over three decades.

Jessica’s path from aspiring computer scientist to elementary educator to tech consultant illustrates the power of strategic pivots and continuous learning. Her story challenges conventional wisdom about career planning, showing how flexibility and adaptability often trump rigid goal-setting.

This Episode Covers:

Strategic Career Navigation Jessica discusses her approach to building multiple skill sets across project management, quality assurance, and business analysis. She explains how diversifying capabilities creates options during uncertain times and why having “Plan B, C, and D” matters more than perfecting Plan A.

The Contract Work Advantage Contrary to popular belief about job security, Jessica makes a compelling case for contract positions as career accelerators. She breaks down the mindset shifts needed to thrive as a contractor and how to leverage temporary roles for skill building and network expansion.

Learning as a Core Competency With a habit of reading 300+ books annually, Jessica shares her methods for rapid knowledge acquisition and retention. The conversation explores practical note-taking strategies and how to synthesize information from multiple sources for real-world application.

Professional Relationship Building From Toastmasters to industry associations, Jessica explains how authentic networking creates career opportunities. Her “volunteer mindset” approach to workplace collaboration offers a fresh perspective on getting the best from professional relationships.

Career Resilience Workshop Insights Jessica developed a custom workshop on career resilience for graduate students, distilling decades of experience into actionable frameworks. She shares key principles around transferable skills, strategic planning, and maintaining employability across economic cycles.

Key Takeaways:

Guest Background: Jessica Parker is a technology consultant specializing in cybersecurity and AI research. She’s currently completing her doctoral dissertation while running a consulting practice that helps small businesses solve complex technology challenges. Her career spans multiple industries including healthcare, finance, and technology, with experience in project management, quality assurance, and organizational leadership.

Resources Mentioned:

Connect with Jessica: Find Jessica’s career resilience workshop and research publications on ResearchGate.https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-parker-pmp/

Career Downloads explores the real journeys of technology professionals, uncovering practical advice for managing your own career with greater success. Host Manuel Martinez brings you authentic conversations about the wins, challenges, and lessons learned along the way.

Listen on your preferred platform: [Apple Podcasts] | [Spotify] | [YouTube Music] | [YouTube]

Subscribe for new episodes every Tuesday featuring diverse voices from the technology industry.

TranscriptionManuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and their experiences with the goal to help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jessica Parker. We met at a local SIM networking event. I asked her a little bit about kind of the things that she has done over time. There was a lot of interesting information in there. We’ve had a couple of follow-up conversations and I’m really excited because apart from, you know, just the different ways that she’s navigated her career, she’s also built a career workshop. She’s a Toastmaster, so there’s a lot of great details within her career that I’m excited to kind of dig into and we probably won’t get to everything, but, you know, that’s probably a good thing because maybe I can convince her to come back and we can do a part two at some point. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Jessica.

Jessica: Thank you so much, Manuel. I really appreciate it. It was so much fun getting to talk to you at the SIM event. The Society for Information Management, our local Las Vegas chapter has grown so much and it’s been exciting because everybody I get to talk to there, I learned so much from them. It’s a lot of fun.

Manuel: I agree and I hadn’t, this is probably only the second or third event that I had been to, but it was probably the first one where I’ve got to speak to more people and kind of learn a lot more. So, you know, I’m very excited and just like you, right? Just like you mentioned, you have the ability to learn and meet new people. So for this conversation, if you wouldn’t mind just kind of telling us where you’re currently at and what it is that you do in your current role.

Jessica: Well, I often describe my role as a consultant and that’s because I am a consultant. I do a lot with understanding data, understanding what’s going on behind the scenes. I do a lot with cybersecurity and AI in my doctoral research because I’m oh so close to finishing up my doctorate. I’m doing the research this semester and hope to defend in the fall. I’m planning to defend in the fall. I got to be positive about this, you see. Determine, I will defend this fall sometime between September and December, and then I will have finally earned my doctorate, which is pretty exciting. And that doctoral thesis is focused on the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, which is where I get to dig into all of that. I do consulting work where I’m helping small businesses figure out their technology solutions. I’m working with one entrepreneur right now, looking to migrate their site from a solution that was built in 2001. Their developer’s in China and the developer’s ready to move on. It’s time to find somebody new. They don’t have a lot of technology folks in their networks. Reached out to me because my sister’s also involved in the project, so it’s kind of fun.

Manuel: That’s amazing. And it’s interesting, you know, just being able to help out in different areas and how you kind of connect with people, right? Like you mentioned, that was your sister that’s involved with it. She brings you in, and I think that’s a theme that I’ve seen through a lot of these different conversations. So now, if you can tell us a little bit about where you grew up, again, we don’t have to go into a lot of detail, but just kind of summarize it for us, and then eventually what your path looked like as, you know, we don’t have to go straight into where you got into technology, but kind of what sparked that interest, or, you know, some people it’s early in their career or in life, and some people it’s not until later on, and they just accidentally fell into it. So I’m very curious to learn more.

Jessica: It was definitely not straight. (both laughing) Anything but straight, circuitous, probably. When I grew up, my mother and I moved quite a bit. We moved less frequently once she remarried, but I did the math. By the time I was 18 years old, I moved an average of once a year. I moved 18 times by the time I was 18 years old. That flexibility that comes with that moving frequently is an asset, the one drawback, well, there’s several other drawbacks, but one of the key drawbacks is you don’t have like that same group of friends that you build deep relationships with during your childhood. So people I knew in kindergarten, aside from family, I don’t know them now, because I never saw them again after that. People I knew from first and second grade, never saw them again after that. Third grade, oh, that was fun. I got to go to two schools. I was really mad because we moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the school year ended in May, to Southern California, where the school year ended about a month later. I was, you know, and for a third grade kid, you’re just mad, what do you mean I have to go to more school? I could have been done. It’s those little things that make you mad as a small child. As an adult, you have more perspective. Over time, we did end up staying enough in the same area that I got to build a little bit more depth of friendship through high school. My high school happened to offer a computer class. This was the eighties, just for context. I’m not shy about my age. I got to take BASIC programming, as we took BASIC programming on an Apple IIe that had less memory than my cell phone does now, we could take apart the computer. So it had basically a lid on top that you could just pop off, and you could see all the circuits. So our computer instructor not only taught us how to program in BASIC, but also how the circuit boards were connected and how everything worked. I was super excited for around my 16th birthday to get my very first computer, an Apple IIe with a double disk drive. You know, the bi...

Show Notes

What does it take to transform from a farm girl in rural Mexico to a cybersecurity solutions engineer at a leading tech company? In this episode, Estela Baca shares her remarkable journey of defying expectations, overcoming setbacks, and building a thriving career in technology.

Estela’s story begins in Teziutlán, Mexico, where she grew up with her grandmother in a family where education wasn’t expected for women. After moving to Los Angeles at 15 without speaking English, she navigated high school, earned a computer science degree (while pregnant), and eventually found her way into cybersecurity through marketing and technical roles.

Key Topics Discussed:

Key Quotes:

Resources Mentioned:

About the Guest:

Connect with Estela:

Episode Highlights:

Whether you’re just starting your career journey or looking to make your next move, this episode provides actionable strategies for professional growth, relationship building, and turning challenges into opportunities.

Subscribe to Career Downloads:

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their background and their experiences, to help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Estela Baca and I had followed her on LinkedIn, saw a lot of the posts, a lot of what she was doing, kind of dug into her background. Eventually I reached out to her and she was very gracious and decided to come on and share her experiences. So I’m very excited, she has a very interesting background, there’s a lot of challenges there and there’s gonna be a lot of good information and a lot of good storytelling for you to kind of listen and learn along the way. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Estela.

Estela: Hi, Manny.

Manuel: Hello. Again, I appreciate you coming in and talking about your experiences and kind of how you’ve managed your career over time. So if you wouldn’t mind just telling us kind of what your current role is and some of those responsibilities and we’ll take it from there.

Estela: Perfect, sounds good. Well, again, Estella Baca, I am currently a solutions engineer for a company that does log management or what some of the people call a SIEM. And some of the main things that I do on a daily is talk to our customers, find their pain points. And for those of you that don’t know what a log management tool is, everything that we use nowadays produces a log. There’s data everywhere, right? Or cell phones or a fit watches, even the TV shows that we watch, right? Everything has data. So the power of data comes when knowing how to leverage that data. So that’s where our SIEM tool comes in. And sometimes before you buy a product, you have to talk to somebody to kind of let them know exactly what is it that you’re looking for. And so that’s where my role comes in, right? My role is mainly talk to our customers and find out what is it that they’re looking for, what problems are they trying to solve in a day to day, how do they manage those massive amounts of data that they have. And in a nutshell, pretty much I helped them discover do they have a small problem, a bigger problem? And realistically, how do they turn their problems into nothing but solutions to get their data and do the most they can with it and grow their businesses, right? Or solve the problems in the long run. My specialty is in cybersecurity. Nevertheless, I do help a lot of our customers to bring in our data for business operations, IT management, application development, and even the IT of things. So it’s just the funny thing about data. You can bend it, twist it, turn it, whatever. It almost reminds me of that game we used to have back in the days, they bump it, twist it, turn it, bump it. And our platform is a lot like a Lego piece, right? So you have a big platform where you have your Lego sets and you can build whatever you want with it. You can have a big city or you can probably have a scene from Star Wars. It’s just what do you wanna do with that data? That’s the easiest way I can think about it. And so my job is to come in and talk to our customers, make them feel comfortable and make them feel like they can find a solution they need with our products.

Manuel: I like the way that you kinda analyze it and kind of explain that for people who may, again, may not be familiar with what a SIEM tool or understanding that everything has a log, right? There’s data and everything. So now I’d like to go back and really kind of understand where you grew up and then eventually kind of what led you into technology and kind of what your first experiences were with technology and kind of made you continue on down that path.

Estela: So I originally was born and raised in Mexico in a tiny town called Teziutlan, which I’m gonna say it in our language, Tesiútio te Petzintla, is in Puebla in Mexico. And so our town is a very small town, my family. I come from a very large family. The people in my family did not go to school. My grandmother doesn’t know how to read. I think my dad only went to middle school. My mom barely made it to, I think, like sixth grade, right? And so education was not a thing for us, especially being a female our role as being a homemaker and a mother. And so when I was growing up, I grew up with my grandmother, which was great. I think we call her, some people call her Dr. Grandma. But to the point, I grew up with my grandmother and my mom loved reading. My mom and my dad loved reading. And if there’s one thing I do remember for the short period of time that I lived with my parents is we used to always read at night. And I was a small, I was probably two, three years old. And I think very vaguely, I remember that the thing we used to do together as a family was go to bed and not watch TV because we didn’t have money for TV, let’s be honest. And so we will grab books, right? And I didn’t know how to read, but my mom had her book, my dad had her book, but I do remember seeing them reading all the time. And so when I moved with my grandmother, we had this huge collection of encyclopedias. Back in the 80s, encyclopedias were like that thing to have, right? It’s like having a dictionary, like having an iWatch today, everybody had one, right? It’s a need. And so my grandmother to me, because I was very hyperactive, I have always been a talker. And so if I didn’t have something to do, I’ll be bouncing off the walls. Or I’d be like, “Grandma, do this, do that.” She didn’t have the time for that. So she will say, or if she would find me sitting on the couch and I was bored, she’d be like, “Oh, you’re bored?” And I’d be like, “Yeah, okay, go pick up that encyclopedia and read something.” And I’d be like, “Oh my God.” And so I was afraid to ever say I was bored because either it was either you go read or you go clean something. And so I was like, “Oh, I sometimes have a much rather clean than read, but it will depend, right?” And so it was through that that my grandmother, my grandmother, my mom and my dad taught me that reading was a scape goat, right? Like if you didn’t wanna just do something bad, like I didn’t wanna do the dishes, I will definitely read that encyclopedia. But then if I didn’t wanna read that encyclopedia, I will go and clean up something. So nowadays if I’m really stressed out, I either read or I clean. (both laughing) I don’t know but it always happens, right? And so while I was growing up, I hear a lot of kids, their parents talk about when you’re gonna go to college or when you go to college. That wasn’t even in my books. I mean, first of all, I never thought I was smart enough. Second of all, female, like what am I gonna do in school, right? And so growing up with my grandmother, she taught me how to be a farmer, right? Like we had chickens and pigs and I was like, “Oh, my life is gonna be, I’m gonna be a farmer. I’m gonna have some chickens. I’m gonna have some pigs and children.” I don’t know. But I will be a really good farmer because I was really good with pigs, right? So a little did I know when my mother left me with my gran...

Show Notes

In this episode of Career Downloads, host Manuel Martinez interviews Paola Mendiola, a promising digital forensics student at CSN who shares her journey into technology and cybersecurity.

Episode SummaryPaola takes us through her tech journey, beginning with the transformative moment when her father brought home their first computer. This experience allowed her to connect with family in Mexico through video calls – a pivotal event that sparked her passion for technology. As a first-generation tech enthusiast, Paola discusses navigating educational opportunities, from her high school IT and cybersecurity program to her current studies at CSN.

Throughout the conversation, Paola candidly shares her experiences with high school robotics competitions, her valuable training at Tech Impact, and how she’s building her professional network as a newcomer to the industry. She provides thoughtful insights about overcoming shyness, establishing a professional presence on LinkedIn, and the crucial importance of finding mentors who can guide your career path.

What makes this episode particularly valuable is Paola’s fresh perspective as someone actively entering the field. Her story of recently speaking to young women in tech and her aspirations to become a cybersecurity educator highlight her commitment to helping others following in her footsteps.

Key Moments in This Episode02:38 – How Paola’s tech journey began when her dad brought home a computer11:55 – Paola’s experience in high school robotics competitions16:24 – Getting hands-on IT experience through Tech Impact29:20 – Transitioning from shy student to LinkedIn networker44:30 – Speaking to young women about tech and coming full circle52:54 – Paola’s aspiration to become a cybersecurity teacher01:02:40 – Advice for people looking for opportunities in tech

Connect with PaolaLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paolamend/

Resources MentionedTech Impact: Non-profit organization providing IT trainingSIM Las Vegas: Society for Information ManagementNCWIT: National Center for Women in Information Technology

New episodes of Career Downloads are released every Tuesday. Subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform to catch all our career conversations with professionals across the tech industry!

Join our community on the social platforms:Website: https://careerdownloads.comLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/career-downloadsYouTube https://www.youtube.com/@careerdownloadsX/Twitter https://twitter.com/@careerdownloadsTikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@careerdownloadsInstagram https://www.instagram.com/careerdownloadsFaceBook https://www.facebook.com/people/CareerDownloads/61561144531249

#CareerDownloads #Cybersecurity #TechCareers #WomenInTech #DigitalForensics

Released: May 20, 2025

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their experiences and how they’re managing their career over time. With the ultimate goal to be able to uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So I’m excited for today’s episode. I have with me, Paola Mendiola. And I’m bringing her on because this is gonna be a slightly different conversation. So most of the times I bring on different guests who are already in the industry, have been in for a while and are explaining the different things that they’ve used throughout their career. So the reason that this one’s exciting for me is I have seen a lot of the posts, a lot of the activities that Paola has been doing, you know, on LinkedIn. I reached out to her, we had a couple conversations and I thought it would be beneficial. She’s somebody that’s new and kind of entering into the field. So I think it’d be perfect time to kind of get the perspective from somebody new who’s starting in. You know, some of her background, what led her into technology. And then also eventually, you know, what are some of the activities that she’s doing and why she chose those and you know, how she feels they have either helped or hindered her along her career journey. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Paola.

Paola: All right, hi everyone. My name is Paola Mendiola and I’m very excited to be here. So a little bit of a background before we go into anything. I’m currently a student at CSN. So I’m doing my associate’s degree in digital forensics. So cybersecurity. So I’m really excited to be here and nervous obviously, but I’m excited.

Manuel: And I appreciate you just kind of telling people what you’re doing now. So if you don’t mind, just so that we can get an idea of kind of where you started. So if you don’t, if you want to tell me, you know, where you grew up and what eventually transpired that made you get interested in technology and it sounds like it might’ve been since you’re a student, there might’ve been something that kind of led you down that path. So, you know, I’m just kind of interested in hearing a little bit more about, you know, that journey.

Paola: Okay, all right. So something, sorry. I’m really excited. That’s what, but I was born and raised here in Vegas. So I was little, grew up here, went to elementary, middle, high school, going to college here. So yeah, that’s a little bit about where I’m from. But to be honest, my tech journey started, I was talking to you about this, like on our Google Meets, but my journey started really when my dad brought home a computer. So back then we didn’t really have like a lot of resources. So the moment when my dad brought home like this really cool computer, I don’t remember what it was. It was like in the, I don’t know, like 2010, 2011. It wasn’t the best computer out there, but he brought home this computer. And well, since then, I kind of fell in love with computers. You know, I was kind of curious about how they worked. Like, you know, he just plugged in stuff on a little like TV monitor thing. You know, suddenly he was able to manage the web. He was able to go on YouTube, watch like cool music videos, that sort of stuff. It was really, really impactful. Along with that, I was able to, well at that time, well, my family, most of them are in Mexico and a lot of them, well, they’re there and they can’t really travel over here because it’s kind of costly and stuff. So what my dad did is he set up like this little Zoom call. No, it wasn’t Zoom. It was like Skype at that time. It was like, oh, long time ago. Like this was before like WhatsApp, like FaceTime, all that sort of stuff. So he set up like this call. And so I was able to see my grandparents for the first time ever. Like, you know, I was usually, well, I was really young, so they couldn’t really send me to Mexico to meet my family. So seeing my abuelita, seeing my aunts, seeing everyone there, like in the video call, kind of really, that’s a moment that like sticks out to me till this day. Like this was like years ago, but being able to see their faces, you know, connect their faces to the voices that I used to hear via like just a regular phone call, really, I don’t know. It was such a like moment that, I don’t know, made me want to pursue tech. I wanted to learn about how I could, you know, make something that helps other people in a similar way. So yeah, that’s kind of a little bit about my background. Yeah, it’s a very, it was a really impactful moment. And I still think about it for this day.

Manuel: And it makes sense. So I remember as a kid, you know, my first introduction to like computers was like in the classroom, but it was very basic. You were doing assignments, occasionally you got to play a game and that was it. But when my dad and his office, like they had gotten a computer and it was old. I remember we had a monitor and it was green. You know, we had to play, we got to play a couple games, but then eventually they, you know, they replaced that and we got to bring that home. And it was just like playing it and like playing around with it and, you know, at the time we didn’t have like, you know, Skype and those kinds of things, but, you know, me and my siblings just playing around and hey, this isn’t working or, you know, hey, something got disconnected. Now the keyboard is not working and like troubleshooting and trying to figure that out was just, it was something that I didn’t realize it at the time, but to your point, right, it stuck with me all those years. So then now you get this computer, you’re obviously, you know, experiencing, you know, not only technology, but what it can do, right? It’s not just like, hey, this does a thing for me. I can print out my, you know, my assignments and do things like that. So then after you get that computer, did you also start kind of using them in school? Did you use it for assignments? Was it really just to kind of play games? Like what was your continuation after that moment?

Paola: To be honest, it was, like our like home computer, like during elementary school, early elementary school, from what I remember, it was just for me to play games. Like to be completely frank, my dad and I would go to the library and we’d pick out like a CD game or like, I don’t know, we’d pick out like a, I don’t know, they don’t even use them a...

Show Notes

Episode Summary

About Our Guest

What You’ll Learn

Key Insights

Episode Highlights

Connect With Jason Frame

Join the Conversation

#CareerDownloads #TechLeadership #CIOInsights #CareerAdvice #TechnologyCareers #ITLeadership #ProfessionalDevelopment

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. Where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their experiences and their career with the goal to really understand how they’ve managed it and try and uncover any tips or strategies that they’ve used that you can go ahead and implement as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jason Frame. So he is a CIO for the Southern Nevada Health District and I’ll let him go ahead and explain a little bit more of kind of what some of the roles and responsibilities that he has, you know, and exactly what they cover. I met him a couple of years back. So we had interacted probably at different networking events when I had attended, when I used to work in the public sector and then eventually I became an SE for VMware, called on his account. So really got to know him a little bit, you know, a more intimate level, understand kind of what he’s done, what he’s been into. He does a lot of public speaking. So I thought he’d be a great person to kind of come in and share his experiences. So with that, I’ll introduce Jason Frame.

Jason: Thanks, Manny.

Manuel: No problem. Appreciate you coming on and, you know, again, we’ve connected and the fact that you were willing to kind of share your experiences.

Jason: Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to that ever since I’ve seen a couple of these podcasts before.

Manuel: So if you don’t mind, just so that people can, who don’t know you, if you just mind telling us, you know, kind of what your role is, I already mentioned your CIO, but again, what are some of the responsibilities for there and then what do you do for the Southern Nevada Health District?

Jason: Perfect. So again, I’m Jason Frame. I’m the Chief Information Officer at Southern Nevada Health District. For those of you who don’t know what Southern Nevada Health District is, we’re the local public health agency in the Las Vegas area. And we also do, besides the public health things that we do, like the restaurant inspections and, you know, we register all of the EMTs in the valley. We make sure all the ambulances are inspected. That’s some of the public health activities that we do. We’re also a primary care provider. So we’re around those communities that are underserved and we’ve opened up multiple clinics to really serve that, the population that’s not getting the healthcare services they need. Another thing that we did, if you remember that couple of years ago, the small thing that happened called COVID, that we were the lead agency on all of that. So everything from the initial contact tracing, testing, doing the vaccinations. We have a public health lab that actually did the tests. And that was all pretty much what we did.

Manuel: I know we’ll get into it, but I’m assuming you have to really support all of that and understand the infrastructure and how you support, especially because it’s remote and diverse. Like for people that don’t know Southern Nevada, you know, it’s Vegas, Vegas is why, but I’m assuming you also cover kind of some of the surrounding areas.

Jason: We do. I mean, we’re mainly in the Las Vegas area, but we also get down to Laughlin. We have an office in Laughlin. We have a Laughlin office in Mesquite. We go out to Pahrump sometimes. We’ve gone out to, you know, as far as up to Ely and some of those other smaller towns, we’ve sent mobile clinics up there to help them out. We sent one with a dentist just to do checkups. So we do help pretty much all of the Southern Nevada area. Our state is so geographically diverse and there’s only a few different health districts in the state. Most of the time when you’re in a, you know, a lot of the states, basically the health department is part of the city or the county. In Nevada, we’re a little bit different because we’re our own jurisdiction. We’re not part of the county. We’re not part of any of the cities. They all have representatives on our board, but we are independent. There’s a couple other independent ones in the state, ones up in Northern Nevada and then Carson City. They’re kind of independent, but they’re also kind of part of the city county of there. And Washoe County has their own health department. Other than that, for the other 13, I guess counties, it’s all just the state that does it. And they’re very limited in what they can do. So we try to help out where we can.

Manuel: So if you don’t mind now, so we know what you currently do, just kind of give us back, you know, kind of go back a little bit to kind of, you know, where you grew up and eventually, you know, at what point in stage you kind of got into technology. Everybody’s different, so.

Jason: So I grew up in Carson City, Nevada. Moved there when I was about four and just, you know, pretty much grew up there until high school. Started playing with technology with the Apple IIe way back in the day. You know, that and then my Atari 2600, that was my introduction to technology. And then we had Commodore 64 and we played around with that. Got into, you know, just being in the computer. I really enjoyed it. I had an uncle that was in IT for the Air Force. And even though I didn’t see him very often, when I did, it just interested me in what he was talking about. I remember going back out as a kid and you buy magazines and I’m just dating myself, right? Or you buy a magazine and you take it home because there was a computer program in that magazine. But this is back before the days of putting a CD or a floppy disk in. No, it was on paper, you had to type it in. And so you’d type in the game and then you get to play it. And, you know, you got to think back, you know, with the Atari 2600 being an eight bit game, this is probably another step back from that. It was more like text-based games or stuff like that. But I loved it so much that I go in there and test it. And, you know, I played around and then I’d see it. Oh, how can I tweak this a little bit? And, you know, just playing around with that code to make it either do something different or do something better for me. So I started off doing that. Got my own, my first computer when I was 10 years old, I guess, back in like 83.

Manuel: And then just kind of, I’m assuming at that point, you just kind of continued on, you know, messing around with it. And, you know, as a 10 years old, I remember something similar. So my dad had his own business. And I remember like the first, my first experience was they had one, they did their accounting and it was the big fiv...

Show Notes

Episode SummaryJeremy Jakubowicz’s path to becoming president of multiple AI companies is far from conventional. After struggling with learning disabilities throughout his education, Jeremy carved out a unique career trajectory through film, education, casino promotions, and tech software before landing in his current role. His story demonstrates how challenges can become stepping stones and how following the “natural path” can lead to unexpected success.

In This EpisodeJeremy shares how his reading and writing disabilities shaped his approach to career development, emphasizing experiential learning and relationship building. From working as a pizza delivery driver to teaching film production, from MC’ing casino events to transitioning into software sales, Jeremy’s journey showcases the power of turning every experience into an opportunity.

His decision to move to Las Vegas for $20,000 less than a competing offer exemplifies his philosophy of betting on long-term vision over immediate gain. Jeremy breaks down how he recognized cultural mismatches in his career transitions and eventually found his home at VizExplorer for seven years before moving into AI.

Key Takeaways– Alternative Learning Paths: How Jeremy compensated for reading/writing challenges by becoming hands-on and experiential– Network as Currency: Building genuine relationships opened doors across industries– The Expiration Date Philosophy: Knowing when to pivot based on growth opportunity, cultural fit, or new challenges– Value-Add Mindset: Continuously bringing past experiences to enhance current roles– Cultural Fit > Money: Learning to evaluate opportunities beyond compensation– Natural Path Theory: Why forcing opportunities often leads to resistance

Notable Quotes“Don’t overthink things. No matter if it doesn’t work out, you’ll gain valuable takeaways from that experience regardless of its failure or success.”“Everything in life has an expiration date. The thing you need to figure out for yourself is when is that expiration date?”“I always found my path through relationships and building friendships that help open those doors.”

Jeremy’s Career TimelineEducational Foundation: Struggled with learning disabilities; found alternative learning methodsFirst Steps: Pizza delivery, film school graduateTeaching Years: Film production teacher with side videography businessCasino Industry: MC, promotions coordinator, progression to managementThe Vegas Gamble: Took pay cut for better opportunity in Las VegasTech Transition: Software sales for casino player tracking systemsVizExplorer Era: Customer success role that lasted 7.5 yearsAI Leadership: Current role as president of multiple AI companies

Connect With Jeremyhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremy-jj-jakubowicz-9848a431/

Listen & SubscribeAvailable on all major podcast platforms. Subscribe to Career Downloads for weekly conversations with professionals who’ve navigated unique career paths.

Episode Length: 1 hour 4 minutesRelease Date: May 6, 2025

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads, where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest, to really learn how they navigated their career over time, with the intention to really help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jeremy Jakubowicz. We connected, we had a couple conversations and he shared a little bit with me about his journey, you know, the different triumphs and struggles that he’s dealt with. And I thought that was really interesting. So decided to ask him to come on and share his story with everybody. So with that, I’ll go ahead and let Jeremy introduce himself. So welcome Jeremy.

Jeremy: Yes, good morning, thank you for having me.

Manuel: I appreciate you coming on and being willing to kind of share your experiences. And, you know, we talked about them, so I don’t want to reveal too much, but if you just go ahead and kind of give us a synopsis of, you know, kind of what you’re currently doing, you know, and just a little quick summary of, you know, your career over time.

Jeremy: Yeah, no, absolutely. Like I said, thanks so much again for having me on the show. So currently right now I’m the president of a handful of small AI driven companies. Started this about six months ago. And yeah, it’s, I’ll never look back, frankly. So yeah, it’s been fantastic. You know, it’s been a, it’s been an interesting journey to get to the point where I have gotten myself today, starting off as just through grade school, if you will, you know, and getting to a point where I find success and, you know, being able to in my career and obviously raising my family.

Manuel: So kind of want to get started. If you give me an idea of, you know, just want to explain to us where you grew up and kind of what eventually, you know, I know we’ve mentioned it before, but you got into technology a little bit later on in life, but just kind of what, you know, what your early aspirations were.

Jeremy: Yeah. You know, I think if you get to know me a little bit more, again, raised in, you know, pretty standard middle-class family down in South Florida, in an up and coming area down there back in the early 80s, excuse me, late 80s and early 90s. And you know, at that point, it was just a, again, a nice clean, safe, you know, family-friendly area to grow up. As I was growing up through grade school, I found some challenges along the way. I was, it was an understanding that I had some reading and writing disabilities as a child diagnosed with these understanding of that, you know, it’s going to be a little tough along the way. And it was, it definitely was, you know, I found myself trying to overcompensate in different ways. And that’s, and I set the stage, you know, with saying those different things, because I think it’s important to anybody’s journey and anybody’s, you know, life as they continue to go through their trials and tribulations of, you know, of career and life that you need to understand yourself. You need to understand, you know, what you, who you are first. And then of course, you know, for everybody, that’s watching this, of course, understanding for me, my journey and the struggles that I had. So point is, is that growing up, again, I struggled with some reading and writing disabilities and, you know, and I would have some help along the way, you know, if it wasn’t tutors or if it was guidance counselors or different mentors along the way that I found to be able to help me in my life, I found myself overcompensating in different ways. So if I struggled in reading and writing, I, you can tell probably that, you know, maybe it’s my personality and different things like that, that I was able to latch onto. I was voted class clown in high school. And so I found myself trying to be more outgoing and funny and things like that to overcompensate for my, the inefficiencies on the reading and writing side of my life. So although struggling through actual grade school, I try to use my personality to overcome those different types of challenges. So with that, you know, I always found myself doing other things besides learning through reading or books or, you know, or traditional styles of education and being more hands-on with different things. So if it’s building skate ramps as a kid or taking apart my toys, you know, and then putting them back together, I found myself doing those types of things was the type of, you know, person and personality that I had that I was gonna learn in other ways, learning by doing, learning by experiencing, learning by failure. And to set the stage, that’s really the different things that I find myself doing in order to get myself and propel myself where I am today.

Manuel: And that’s pretty interesting, the fact that, you know, you decided to find other ways to learn, right? Because a lot of times, and I’m sure, even with it being a struggle, did you feel that you put in an extra effort on your own to try and kind of surpass that? Or was it really other people kind of helping push you, right, because again, both ways are good. I know sometimes we need just that kind of that motivation, you know, you mentioned you had tutors and people that are like, “No, hey, you can do this.” But then was there also some of that self-determination to say, “Oh, I’m gonna do this.” It may not be the way that you expect me to, but I’m gonna overcome this.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think that’s a, I think you nailed it right there. Definitely the latter on this one. I was determined to find a different path than the traditional one that maybe, you know, I grew up believing that you needed to take, right? I know these days with kids, you know, it’s not so traditional in the way that you need to learn and understand things to be successful in this world. But I do believe in the early, you know, in the 90s and things like that, that was still kind of the, you know, the understanding of how you, you know, you get a job and, you know, how you become, you know, a functioning person in society, right? So with that being said, yes, I definitely had some help along the way that was pushing me in certain ways and motivating in others. I, as I mentioned to you, it’s, there’s not a lot of people that actually know that I even have, I struggled, you know, with, you know, those different areas of, you know, in my education and still to that, you know, today, you know, that’s something that kind of sticks with me. But I’ve always, I was able to find those other paths of relationship building and path of, you know, learn...

Show Notes

In this enlightening episode of Career Downloads, host Manuel Martinez sits down with Sean Leu, a senior IT manager who transformed his career from working as an electrician apprentice to leading development teams in the financial technology sector. This conversation offers invaluable insights into navigating career transitions, developing leadership skills, and embracing continuous learning in the ever-evolving tech industry.

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Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads, where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their background, their experiences, to really uncover and understand the different things that they’ve done to manage their career, with the expectation that eventually we can help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Sean Leu So Sean and I, it’s probably been quite a few years now, we’ve crossed paths, so I was working for a VAR, a value-added reseller, helping do a project to do an implementation for them, and then also kind of do some hands-on training and knowledge transfer. We connected, we kind of stayed in contact a little bit over the years, I’ve seen some of the different areas he had moved to, and really thought it’d be a good opportunity to kind of bring him in, learn more about what he did, some of the decisions he made, and some of the challenges and triumphs that he encountered along the way. So with that, I’ll introduce Sean.

Sean: Hey, Sean Leu, I am the senior manager at a financial tech firm, basically working on ServiceNow platform. I think it’s probably been about 15 years or so since we met, I’m guessing probably 2011-ish, if my math is probably correct. But I’ve had a weird, kind of not a straight journey to where I am today, started out as a electrician apprentice. 01:43 lot of the people that I talk to in the IT field, they don’t start in the IT field. You start someplace else and you realize, hey, maybe I wanna change careers. So I started as an electrician apprentice back in 2001. 01:58 t was fun, it was a way to make money, but it wasn’t something that I could see myself doing for the rest of my life. So I went back to school at San Jose State University back in 2003. Actually went to school for aeronautical engineering, did an internship for a firm out in Silicon Valley, realized I didn’t like the environment that I was working with, the people that I was working with, it was kind of dry. Went back to school for, changed my major to management information systems for the IT side, loved it, haven’t looked back ever since. Got an internship out here in Vegas, that’s why I’m here in Vegas, kind of moved back and forth between Vegas and other states. Worked for the Department of Energy, top secret networks, things of that sort, kind of bounced back between different government agencies for the next like five to 10 years, Department of Defense out in Hawaii, Pearl Harbor, other different bases, eventually made a move to the casino industry, oddly from government to casino, very different. And then after that, I moved back into the kind of the financial tech firm or industry. All through that, like I mentioned, I didn’t have a straight path to where I am to a ServiceNow developer position as a senior manager. I started as a winter intern for that Department of Energy, to help desk, to desktop support, to systems engineering, had some database administration in there, some tech support, and then some security aspects. Like I mentioned, to many people, the only thing I haven’t done is networking. will not touch networking, because I am bad at it, so I know my limitations. So I’ve had a different path, right? It’s not a straight path to where I am today, but I’ve enjoyed the ride, and I think it’s kind of helped me develop who I am to kind of take that odd kind of windy path to where I am today.

Manuel: I appreciate the way you kind of summarized that and gave a little bit of an expectation of kind of what people can expect. And you and I have kind of talked in the past. You mentioned that you kind of started as the apprenticeship as an electrician. Was that just something that, you know, hey, I want to kind of start paying the bills, just kind of work, not understanding what you wanted to do? Because I think a lot of times people think, and I’m glad you brought it up, is that you have to know that, hey, I want to get an IT, or hey, I want to do networking. But that’s not the case. And I would say that most people probably don’t. They’re figuring it out along the way, just because there’s so many different avenues. So is that kind of what happened? What eventually got you started there?

Sean: Yeah, and when I did the apprenticeship, it was like, hey, you know, just try to apply for it. My uncle worked for the Pearl Harbor shipyard. He was like, hey, we have an apprenticeship program. They have different avenues you can go. You can be an electrician, you can be a painter, you can do all these different. So I chose the electrician. I got into the program. It was like a four-year program where you’re an apprentice, you follow mentors. After probably the second year, I realized that it wasn’t really the career that I was looking for. It was more like, hey, it was more monotonous. Or like, hey, go do this exact same thing this year. Like, hey, same day, same thing, just a different day. I felt like I was kind of stuck in a rut. And my brother, who’s probably like five years older than me, he’s an IT. He was going– he was living in California. Just over on the dot-com boom, he was working for IBM. And it seemed really fun. Like, he was making friends. He was doing cool things. And he was, at that time, making a lot of money. I was just like, hey, this sounds like a career that I can kind of look into. So then I made that move to San Jose State to go back to school. Aeronautical engineering was my first, because I don’t want to be a copy paste of my brother. So I was like, aeronautical engineering, try that out. But then eventually, I came back to IT, because I’ve always loved computers. I’ve always kind of been that techy person. But I’ve never seen it as a career, and so I went back to school for it.

Manuel: In your experience, right? Because you mentioned that it’s kind of being an intern. And it was just– it’s monotonous. IT is not that way. And I think a lot of times people th...

Show Notes

In this captivating episode of Career Downloads, Manuel Martinez sits down with Alan Cunningham, a technology leader with a rich and varied background. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Alan shares his remarkable journey from working at age 12 to becoming the CIO for the State of Nevada.

Alan walks us through his early fascination with electronics, building sound-to-light units for his DJing career despite being colorblind. His path took him through the British Army where he worked as a signaller, which sparked his journey into technology.

After moving to the US in 1995, Alan quickly established himself in the tech world, running a computer store by his second day. Throughout his career, he’s worked as an IT technician, software expert, consultant, ISO for Washoe County School District, and ultimately CIO for the State of Nevada.

What stands out in this conversation is Alan’s unwavering commitment to honesty and integrity, which has guided his career decisions even when they led to challenging transitions. He offers practical wisdom for those entering the tech field, emphasizing the importance of building a solid foundation of knowledge through help desk positions or working at small computer stores where problem-solving skills are constantly tested.

Alan also shares valuable insights about critical thinking, continuous learning, and the reality behind trending technologies like AI and cloud computing. His straightforward assessment of these tools cuts through marketing hype to reveal their true utility.

Whether you’re just starting your career or looking to advance to leadership positions, this episode provides a wealth of practical advice and inspiration from someone who’s navigated the ever-changing technology landscape for four decades.

Listen to the full episode to learn how Alan’s commitment to quality work and straightforward communication has shaped his successful career in technology.

#CareerDownloads #TechLeadership #CyberSecurity #CIOAdvice

Transcription

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their career and their experiences, to really uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Alan Cunningham. So we’ve crossed paths a couple of times, most recently at a couple of networking events. But when I first met him, he was actually the CIO for the state of Nevada on public sector. Kind of speaking to a couple of contacts that we have in common, they mentioned they had a very interesting story, interesting background, looking at his profile. So me and him have chatted prior to this and I feel like there’s gonna be a lot of good information and a lot of good stories just for people to kind of understand, you know, again, and just find areas that they can find, that you can find that would be beneficial in your own career and help you improve and progress as you manage that. So with that, I will bring on Alan Cunningham.

Alan: Good afternoon, how are you?

Manuel: Doing very well, thank you for taking the time to come and speak and really just share your experiences.

Alan: Yeah, thanks for the invite. It’s always good to try and give back to the community in whichever way we can.

Manuel: Definitely. If you could just start by just giving us a brief summary of kind of what your current position is and just some of the roles and responsibilities that you’re in charge of today.

Alan: At the moment, I’m working with Cyroot.io You had Asal Gibson on your last show, who is the CEO. I actually worked with her at the contract position at Clark County School District about a year and a half ago. We both got along really well. So when my contract finished with the county, Asal asked if I’d become the CIO. So really I’m the lead technical contact for the company. We’re working a lot on federal, state and government bids. So I look at all the technical requirements and see if we don’t have that talent in-house, where can we reach out to partners and make partnerships to be able to satisfy those bid requirements. So that’s mainly my duties, if you want to call on that at the moment. I’m also on the board of the Cyroot Academy, which is Asal’s nonprofit, which provides free technical training to transitioning military veterans or transitioning military and veterans and underserved communities who are looking for technical training. I’ve been a trainer most of my adult life in various subjects. So I think that’s really important. I’m a British army veteran. I’m not an American army veteran. So I do resonate with the needs of that because military is the same the world over, whichever way you go for it. So that’s really what I’m up to right now.

Manuel: And I kind of looked at your profile and I did see that there’s a bit of security background. So I’m really interested to kind of dig into that, as the conversation progresses. But really at this point, what I want to kind of now transition into is, if you can kind of give us just a little bit of background of where you grew up and eventually what got you kind of interested in technology. Everybody’s different, different stages in life.

Alan: Yeah, and it’s funny, like once upon a time in a land far, far away, that lived an ogre, because everybody goes with the accent. So I always get the Mike Myers thing with Shrek. And it’s great, like I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Eastern General Hospital. The reason that kind of came up in top of mind, when I applied for my citizenship here after 20 years, I had two green cards. And I went in for my second INS interview. And the lady standing behind her desk with her back to me, she said, sit down, Mr Cunningham. And then she kind of turned her head and said, which maternity hospital were you born in in Edinburgh? And I’m like, well, Eastern General. And she said, well, I was born in Simpson’s Hospital, which is this other maternity hospital two weeks after you. So it was just serendipitous that that happened, which led to me getting all the easy questions on the test, which was funny. But that whole citizenship process was enlightening. And it’s interesting when you look into some of the coincidental. I don’t think they were coincidental. I think they happened. We can talk about that later as well. But so born in Scotland, lived in the country until I was 19. Left school when I was 15 and a half. I’d been working since I was 12 and a half. Evenings, weekends, anything I could get. Then at 14, when I was 14, I started working in a record store, which led to DJing. And eventually, it’s like I’m a great Scottish comedian because I can go around elliptically around the subject and then come back to it again. Billy Connolly, if you ever look him up, he’s phenomenal at that. He’ll talk on something for 20 minutes and then come right back to where you thought you were going in the start. So once I got into DJing, I started building my own electronics for sound to light units, because you couldn’t they were very expensive at the time. So I did some studying at the library at the time because you couldn’t just jump on YouTube because this is pre-internet days and start designing my own PCB boards and putting transistors and stuff together, which was a major challenge for me because I happen to be fully colorblind. So that’s a major challenge for more jobs than you can imagine. Just totally barred just because you’re colorblind. And then once I DJed for years and I joined the army and I’d been into CB radio and just general technology stuff. And then when I joined the military, I was in the infantry and one of the parts of those is communication. So I became a signaller doing radio communications for AhF, satellite, VHF, bus transmissions, all that kind of stuff, encryption, and then transitioned as the military started to get computers. You know, it was like, well, here’s a piece of technology. You know technology. Fix it. No training. No, nothing. I remember the first kind of computer I worked on was a word star word processor. It had a single line of LCD text that you could go in and had a daisy wheel printer. And I remember fixing those. And just before I left the military and came here in 1995, I was working at the signal school as an instructor teaching instructors how to teach. And we were putting in a local area network there. So I was working with the civilian company, digging trenches, laying coax cable, putting on 51 resistors, building star topology networks and ring topology networks and learning all about that before I left the military. And the British Army has some similar programs, the American Army, for transitioning out of military service. So I did like six months at a local college, public community level college, it would be here, on networking, database design, IT administration. So that kind of set me up when I arrived here in 95. I got a job at a local computer store as an IT tech. I was running it the second day I was there, because I just can’t stand disorder. I have to put order where chaos is. And that was great. A place called Technology Center still open today. Curtis and Tim, if you get a chance to watch it, keep going guys. And thanks for everything you taught me. Those are two guys who worked there.

Manuel: And I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I question there. So understanding, running the coaxial cable, doing the trenches, was it something that you… I mean, you were part of not just laying the coaxial, but you actually had to dig the… You were doing everything top to bottom?

Alan: Yeah. It was on a military base. And I was kind of like the liaison between the civilian company and the military side. So wh...