Digital Chatter Episode #006: Susan Weeks

Eric: Hello and welcome everyone to another episode of digital chatter. My name is Eric Sharpe and today our wonderful guest is Ms. Susan Weeks. Susan, say hi.

Susan: Hello everybody, nice to speak to you all!

Eric: So Susan is an entrepreneur and she is a podcaster, in fact a professional podcaster. She has been running her business for over five years and helping people develop their podcast. And we're going to learn a little bit about Susan today and how she got into all of this. But Susan I want you to tell everyone how you got started.

Susan: OK. Yes. Well how I got started is doing something totally different from the podcasts that you said which I am now. So I actually started as a mainframe computer programmer back in the late 80s. At a large car factory in the north of England. And who'd thought that the skills that I learned there which had nothing to do with podcasting but were everything to do with systems and organization and working out the best ways for people to do things. So those skills don't leave you. And as I progressed through the professional I.T. career progression and also moved companies and finished up running and founding a training organization as well, on well the last place I worked at. And again that's all to do with helping people and teaching people and helping them be the best that they can be. So I feel that I'm very fortunate in that the skills I developed through my professional career I've managed to then build on and transfer over to the Internet world and laterly into podcasting. So that's kind of in a nutshell where, where I come from. So it's always interesting I think as to how things change we didn't expect and to be doing what you, what you finish up doing.

Eric: Sure, sure. And you know maybe maybe walk me back you know 10 plus years ago. You know I know your story a little bit more but walk us back and you know tell us what happened. You know you had some dramatic changes in your life that changed things.

Susan: Yes, somewhat. So and going back to the early 2000s. So by this time I'd worked my way through and from, from my original job at a car factory and for a long time I felt as if I was a square hanging around so basically. I didn't always feel as though as I fit. The work was fantastically interesting, really really was. But a new startup came into the city where I was working and they were looking for people like me and my friends and colleagues who had those professional skills and specific skills in sort of the mainframe technologies time and they were basically the headhunt because they'd set up an outsourcing organization where people like myself my colleagues who were in the north of England and we didn't want to go down to the main financial centre in London and particularly we were quite happy with where we were. So a lot of the big- there were actually, the company was working for two or three with the large American investment banks so Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan Chase were two of the main clients.

Susan: So they wanted access to this pool of people so that's how this company was setup and myself, some other colleagues, and ultimately quite a lot of people were all headhunted and attracted to this new company. And yeah it was it was it was great. There was a lot of opportunity there for interesting work. It came to the point however that we ran out of people to you know to headhunt. So we had to start training people with similar technical experience into the specific technologies that we needed. So there was Stettinius training from Cheneau and had a really, I had a really nice job I had so much freedom I could- and I always said,