Show Notes

Jeramie Brown’s career journey proves there’s no single path to technology leadership success. Starting as a radio and television broadcaster in the Air Force, Jeramie spent 24 years learning storytelling, communication, and adaptability while gradually building technical expertise. Today, he serves as Chief Information Officer for a Nevada public agency and President of the Las Vegas AITP chapter.

This conversation explores how diverse backgrounds create stronger tech leaders. Jeramie shares his transition from analog broadcasting to digital technology, the leadership lessons learned through military service, and practical strategies for embracing change in fast-moving tech environments.

“Artificial intelligence is not a replacement for you or for anybody, it is an augmentation tool. It will help you do your job or do that task better, faster, more reliable.”

“I wanted to be the guy that they could go to and ask questions and I can help guide them to the right answers.”

“You have to find a way to convey the information in a story, right? Because that’s what people are gonna connect to.”

Career Downloads explores diverse paths to technology success. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and visit our website for full episode transcripts and resources.

#CareerDownloads #TechnologyCareers #ITLeadership #CareerAdvice

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 background, 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 Jeramie Brown and I’m very excited, we met in a professional setting. He is in senior leadership, so I’m very excited to kind of uncover his path to that type of role and kind of what he’s learned along the way. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Jeramie. Hi Jeramie.

Jeramie: Hi Manuel.

Manuel: I appreciate you taking the time to come on and share your experiences.

Jeramie: Oh, I’m super excited to be here. I love things like this, like getting the opportunity to help people grow in their career and kind of figure out where they wanna go and like where they are now, where they wanna be and how to get there.

Manuel: Fantastic. This is the perfect place to do that. (both laughing) So if you don’t mind kind of telling us what your current role and responsibilities are, just a summary and we’ll eventually work that way as part of the conversation.

Jeramie: Sure. So I’m the chief of information technology in a public sector agency. And so what that really means is I drive the strategic direction for technology within my organization. I help different business units or divisions determine what their technology needs are gonna be. Like where are they right now? What are they looking at in the future? Help guide them along that path to develop a five year plan. Like where do they wanna be five years from now? What does that look like in their space? And every division is different, right? HR is gonna be different than financial management, which is gonna be different from a construction division or a design division. Like people that are designing buildings or highways or whatever, like their needs are gonna be different than the rest of the organization. So helping them to identify those needs and develop a plan to get from where they are now to where they wanna be, especially with the sheer speed at which technology is changing now, right? Trying to predict where they’re gonna be five years from now really takes some thought and some, no kidding, planning on how do we get to, how are we gonna incorporate these new tools into our existing processes? Because we have to. The companies that are producing software packages and anything really, they’re looking at how are we gonna embed AI into this tool? What benefit is it gonna provide to the customer? And so we need to start looking at those things now. And so that’s my goal is to, like that’s kind of my responsibilities. Of course we keep the lights on, we provide support for end user devices, phones, computers, laptops, all of that. And we have those plans, we still maintain servers and we do all of the IT stuff, right? But we do more than that, right? IT now is very much not only keeping the lights on but helping the organization plan for where their technology is gonna be in the future. So that’s kind of my responsibilities.

Manuel: Sounds like you don’t do too much, right? (both laughing) So now if you kind of take us a little bit farther back and kind of tell me where you grew up and eventually what was your first introduction to technology and kind of your career progression as that progressed.

Jeramie: So I grew up in a very small town in central Illinois. It’s called Williamsville. It’s about 10 miles north of Springfield, about four hours south of Chicago. Very small farming community, a thousand people, right? Growing up, Williamsville and a town next to us called Sherman combined in junior high and high school. My graduating class in high school was 76 people. So small. But my introduction to technology actually started in that small town. I was born in the 70s. Growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the first VCRs came out, right? And so learning to program that VCR, you have the joke about, my parents couldn’t program a VCR. My parents couldn’t program a VCR, right? That was brand new technology. And so learning how to do that really sparked that interest in technology. And then when I was in high school, we had a very small high school, right? But we had a computer class with Apple IIEs. And so I learned basic programming as a junior in high school on Apple IIEs. And it really excited me. Looking back, I always thought for years, I was a good student. And then when I started going to college, I had to pull my high school transcripts. And I was like, huh, maybe I wasn’t such a great student in high school. I should have focused more. But my computer classes, rock solid. Computers just make sense to me, right? Technology just makes sense to me. So it really got me excited. And unfortunately, I didn’t go into a technology career right away. I actually joined the Air Force when I was 18 or 17. I joined delayed enlistment. Went to basic training at 18. And I became a radio and television broadcaster. Like I was a broadcast journalist for 24 years. That’s what I did. But the interesting thing about that was, when I first started, everything was analog. So our audio was analog. It was reel to reel tapes. And I like, I had no kidding, would rock those reels back and forth to find a splice point, take a razor, cut the tape, find another splice point, take the razor, cut the tape, or cut the tape, and then tape it all together, right? And edit that way. That’s how we edited audio. And TV, it was all analog TV. We used Betamax. And like we had two machines, and you would set your in and out points, and it was all analog. And you’d record from one tape to another. And then those processes started changing. And we started introducing digital editing, right? The first digital editing I did was in audio. And we used a Mac computer. I don’t remember what the software was now. It was like, this was like in the early 90s. But we started editing on digital formats and learning how to do that. And all of the technology that’s associated with it, like it led to that. And then TV or video started adapting to that as well. And we moved from analog tapes to digital audio tapes or digital video tapes. But we’d still edit in an analog fashion. And then we started recording to computer, right? And you’d take your video and you’d dump it into the computer and then you’d edit that way. And then that moved into recording on the camera, onto a hard drive. And so you would just start editing directly on those. And so learning that technology along the way, and all of the backbone stuff for it, we had to, like nobody knew how to run those networks for audio and video editing. So we had to do it ourselves. We had some engineers that took care of that. And those of us that were broadcas...