General Sessions

Keynote: Navigating Your Career in IT - Strategies for Success in the Second Half

July 18th, 2023

11:00am - 12:00pm

Rick Claus

Principal Cloud Advocate Team Lead

Microsoft

Orin Thomas

Principal Hybrid Cloud Advocate

Microsoft

Most career advice for IT professionals involves the first part of your career. How to get hired. How to move up from the support desk to managing the big workloads. How to build a portfolio of valuable career skills that allow you to solve the problems. But what’s rarely discussed is how to manage and tend to your career beyond that first decade – how do you keep your career resilient and continue to have a rewarding and valuable career through middle age and on to retirement? If you’re intending to spend the bulk of your career working in IT, you need to have a strategy to capitalize on your valuable experience as well as how to make the right choices on what new skills to add to your portfolio. In this session we’ll take you through how to take the long term approach to navigating the rest of your life in IT – not just what you should learn in the next few years, but what you should know to be successful for the rest of your days in the profession.