Do the Prep Work: Keep Your Eyes Open when Career DR Planning with David Klee (2/2)

How prepared are you for a career emergency like losing a job? Disaster recovery plans for your career, just like troubleshooting, start with good documentation of technical and business accomplishments.

David Klee returns in episode 316 to share the prep work required for building and testing a disaster recovery plan for our careers. You’ll learn how to use David’s technique of looking in the mirror (inside yourself) and out the window (out into the world / greater technical community) to quiet the fear and document and identify transferable skills that can be listed on a resume, on LinkedIn, or shared in a job interview. As we talk through each topic or recommendation, David shares concrete examples from his experience to illustrate how they apply.

Original Recording Date: 01-20-2025

David Klee is a returning guest and the owner and chief architect at Heraflux Technologies. If you missed part 1 of this discussion series with David, check out Episode 315.

Topics – Keep Your Eyes Open with the Mirror and the Window, Accomplishments as Repeatable Processes, Transparent Outcomes and the Hero’s Journey, Avoiding the Cold Start with Prep Work, Testing a Career DR Plan

3:28 – Keep Your Eyes Open with the Mirror and the Window

• We all have intentions of keeping disaster recovery plans for our careers and lives up to date, but we fall short.
  • “The tech side is arguably the easier part. DR for the career, especially in this day and age…if you get cut today…what are you going to do? What’s the next step? Are you ready to take an unplanned detour in life? Who do you know? What do you know? What have you done that you can talk about or reference to help you get the next leg up? What have you done that’s so proprietary that you can’t mention a spec of it or it’s so proprietary that it doesn’t transfer out of that job?” – David Klee, on disaster recovery for your career
  • David talks about his first job in college working for a market research firm. The firm had a platform with its own scripting language that could be used to build websites or surveys. David acted as an intermediary between the team that built the platform and the team that used it.
    • “I spent three years there. What did I learn? I learned how to script in a language that does not leave that company borders. That’s not a good career builder unless you intend to stay with that company for your entire career, and this is the 2020s. Good luck with that.” – David Klee
    • John says this could be something we could ask about in an interview. A company is basically asking for an employee to be a captive of that group because of the proprietary nature of the language. David says in most cases like this an employee will not know it until they are in the situation.
    • "It takes keeping your eyes open…no matter how much you enjoy your job…is the captivity of this job worth it? Is there job security? Do I enjoy what I’m doing? Am I growing, or am I just moving laterally? What’s worth it? " – David Klee
    • In this job at the market research firm, they found out David was a good troubleshooter, and they wanted him to fix bugs on the platform others had built. Even when David proposed that it would be faster to rebuild the platform on newer versions of software, they insisted he focus on patching the existing platform.
• What does David mean by keeping your eyes open?
  • “Keeping your eyes open involves looking at yourself in a mirror. And then, look out the window.” – David Klee
  • David says to look in the mirror we should think about what we want to do, w