Episode Information
Show Notes
Career Downloads: Manuel Martinez’s Tech Journey Continues
In this episode of Career Downloads, we dive back into the fascinating career of our host, Manuel Martinez, as he shares the second half of his tech journey. Get ready for an engaging ride through the ups and downs of his professional life, packed with valuable lessons and insider tips!
Key Points:
1. From Server Manager to Value-Added Reseller (VAR)
2. Mastering automation and orchestration
3. The journey to VMware certifications
4. Multiple attempts to join VMware – persistence pays off!
5. Leveling up presentation skills for executive audiences
6. Transitioning to AWS and embracing cloud technologies
Highlights:
Manuel’s hilarious garage office setup during COVID-19 lockdowns
The importance of asking qualifying questions in client meetings
How to negotiate salary and prepare for interviews at big tech companies
Career Lessons:
Embrace continuous learning and upskilling
Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks, including pay cuts for growth opportunities
Develop both technical and soft skills for career advancement
Network and leverage connections for new opportunities
Master the art of negotiation for better compensation
What’s Next:
Stay tuned for future episodes where Manuel will share more insights from his tech career and bring on exciting guests to share their stories!
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#CareerDownloads #TechCareers #ITJourney #CloudComputing #VMware #AWS #CareerAdvice #PodcastNotes
Transcription
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Career Downloads. Unfortunately, you’re still stuck with having to learn about me and my career and kind of how I navigated. So we’re going to go on through and continue on with the second half of my career and come with some of the things I learned along the way, things I wish I would have known sooner, things I might have done differently. I do have other guests lined up, so those recordings are coming up. So again, we’ll get back to kind of refreshing and bringing on a different guest for all the new episodes.
So when we kind of left off on the last one, I was working at the college as a Server Manager and decided that at that point I really didn’t want to continue to go down the management route and it might be a good idea for me to start and I started looking at other opportunities. So one of the contacts that I made there while at the college was a friend of mine by the name of Chance. So he’s come up in another episode and one of the things is during our conversation of working together at the college, we had talked about wanting to do more architecture level type of work, you know, being able to do a lot of the implementations from the get-go. So that was something that was really fun and interesting. I’ve done a lot of migrations, done a lot of configuring current environments and kind of getting them up to speed. That was fun and challenging, but I really liked going through and setting up new environments.
So he had reached out to me. He had left a while back and went over to a VAR, which is a value-added reseller. So they resold equipment, you know, a lot of Cisco gear. They were big NetApp, VMware, and Cisco UCS shop. And you know, he thought that I might be a good fit. So he had gone over, was doing a lot of networking for new companies and asked if it was something that I’d be interested in, you know, based on conversation that we had had while working together. And it was something that really piqued my interest, right? They were looking for somebody here in the Las Vegas area to do more on the server infrastructure side. So I decided to go through and, you know, put in an application and see what came about of that.
So that was really fun.