I took a new job!

Wow, is this thing on? I never blog on here anymore. However, after 4 years and 10 months I decided to switch it up and got a new job! However… it is and isn’t all that different. I’m even still at the same company! The short form? I went from Technical Trainer to Global Delivery Readiness Technical Lead for Americas! Wait what’s that? (Besides a mouthful!)

First, backing up – maybe you know since January 2017 I’ve been a Technical Trainer at Amazon Web Services (aka AWS). That was also a big shift for me, and looking back I never really wrote about that, so first a few words: Technical Trainer is the best job I’ve ever had. Before that point I was always nominally some form of technical support in some way shape or form. Maybe I was working a helpdesk and “under tables pulling cables” or maybe I was a system administrator making *nix or windows sit up and bark or maybe I was a helpdesk manager coordinating a 24×7 coverage or maybe I was a lab engineer creating front and backend environments for user testing. In all of those roles I gained a reputation as a subject matter expert, a helpful individual, and pro at distilling complex topics. Technical Trainer took all the stuff I liked about those roles and it became just the fun parts: public speaking, broad expertise, and no more on-call duty! I got to travel (a lot) to customer sites and help them understand AWS maybe a little bit more, but I was only there for 3 or 4 days and onto the next! It was exhilarating! It still is, even without the travel (darn you Covid) because there’s no substitute for getting direct access to customers.

Why would I leave the best job ever? Well, being a technical trainer has the potential to be very solo– the classroom belongs to the instructor, and usually there’s no other backup — or so I thought. In my interview I was told, “it’s as solo as you want to be, but all the other trainers want you to succeed too” – and it changed my mindset. I threw myself into the collaborative aspects of the role. Once I got my sea legs (admittedly very quickly!) I was answering technical questions in our team chats, discussing process and best practices, and generally spending lots of time contributing to the wide community that is my team. After a couple years of this it came out a team was formed whose charter was fostering this connective glue between these distributed trainers under the heading of Global Delivery Readiness, and it just seemed like a good fit when the opportunity arose to be a Technical Lead. Being a global team there are regional technical leads – hence “Americas” in my title. Similar to how Technical Training got me focused closer to the things I liked about all the other roles, I think this one helps me focus even more – I get to work so trainers are my customers!

This team’s scope includes external trainers, too, so it’s a chance for a lot of big impact. I’m not saying I wouldn’t go back to technical training. In fact, I’d love to do train-the-trainer style training and skills development workshops! I think there’s a lot of cool potential and opportunities. All the details aren’t fleshed out yet, and it’s only been a week, but so far it’s an interesting change. Mostly it seems like this job is made of meetings. Hopefully, nice, productive ones where I’m mentoring trainers or making plans for skills development or actually working on projects! Without the pressure of weekly classes, I’m maybe most excited about the ability to be a more longer term focused and think and do things that can make life easier for the whole of the trainer community.

I’m pretty happy that I can continue career evolution 25+ years on. It gives me hope that pretty much every job I’ve had has been very technically aligned but different in some interesting way. I’ve never considered myself a lifer at any job I’ve had, though I’ve always had a bit of a longer term lens. I’m happy to see how long I can keep this up!