Luck is Not a Career Success Strategy

hi everyone i'm suzanne ricci i'm here today to lead this great conversation we're going to have on luck is not a career success strategy and so i will say i don't get to see any of you so i'm literally just staring at a camera at myself um so if anybody if you could just drop in the chat something so that i know you're out there i have a presentation i'm gonna share hi mike all right awesome thank you guys and so i'm gonna go ahead and share my screen and then we're gonna have a conversation just about what can we do so that we are not leaving our career success in the hands of other individuals right

so let me share okay so you should be able to see my screen right as well as now it's a really different look for me alright so now you can see my screen as well as me if you choose to see me so let me take a minute and introduce myself as i said i'm suzanne ricci i'm the chief success officer at computer coach technology training we provide it and business certification training for individuals who are looking to upskill and land the opportunities that we're looking for we train in the areas of networking cyber security coding data we have a really strong business division so what that really means for you is i get the pleasure of coaching

individuals in a very diverse i.t background i have done this for the last 22 years in tampa bay and i'm incredibly proud to say i've helped thousands of individuals at this point get to their defined career success it's something i have a real passion for the more you get to know me you're gonna know i really do have a passion for helping other people but also what you're gonna get to know about me is i'm really not comfortable talking about myself so with that if anybody does have any specific questions please don't hesitate to use the q a we're going to have a little presentation here and then i really want to open it up and

answer the questions that are facing you right now what are your pain points in your career and we'll see if we can work some of those kinks out right so with that let's get started oh hold on my screen's not moving all right so let's talk about what is career success and this is really important because we often you know growing up we get told things like well go be successful go to college get a degree you'll be successful but the truth is is that we're never really truly taught how to define what is success for us as individuals it's very very possible and incredibly likely that the person you're sitting next to even in this virtual world has a very

different definition of career success and for me i've interviewed thousands of individuals at this point and i always ask them well how do you define career success and the truth is is not a lot of people can answer that question because sometimes they haven't even thought about it they just know they've been told almost their entire lives to go be successful and then sometimes we'll reach the end of our lives and we'll even you know sit down and we'll be contemplating well was i a success or not and so what i found throughout my years of helping others as well as planning and preparing my own career success is that we need to define what career

success is we need to define the difference between career success and family success and fun time success and we can have all of these definitions that are coexisting at the same time but what's in really important what we're going to talk about today is career success in coming up with the definition and so i think it goes with that old saying right if you fail to plan you plan to fail and your career is no different than that a lot of times i will have people say to me when i ask so where do you want to go in your career they'll say well i don't know i never thought about it you know my

company just has this plan and that's kind of the the secession planning that they have i just kind of follow that and i go oh well do you want to do that and they'll say well i don't know i never really even thought about it and the thing is is that your career is yours and no one's going to care about it more than you and so i created this tiered plan to success and what it really does it doesn't matter if you're in school and you're new to your career or if you're 10 years in and you have lots of experience when i sit down with customers i sit down and i plan okay where do you want to be in the next

five years if you want to do it for seven years you can do it for seven years it's perfectly fine but i like to plan out at least five years where do you want to be in five years forget where you are now where do you want to be in five years we want to make sure that that's a realistic goal okay so realistically let's say if you're just coming out of college or let's say you're one year into a master's program you have two more years well your five-year goal of being a ciso that's probably not realistic right so pick something what is realistic for you where can you be in five years and i have customers who do that in a

lot of different ways because not everybody knows what job title they want to be at right so you can do it by job title you can do it by salary let's just say in five years i want to maybe have one child i want to be married and i want to own my house for me to make that possible i'm gonna need to be in a career that makes at least a hundred thousand dollars a year that's fine we have something now that we can plan off of because if we know that we're going to start today as maybe a um sock analyst and where can we be in five years that will get us

a hundred thousand dollar salary now to do that because we now have where we want to be in five years we can reverse engineer the entire plan so now we can start doing research on okay i need to make a hundred thousand dollars what careers within my industry pay a hundred thousand dollars what are those job titles what skills do i need within each of those job titles and at this point you would then be able to say okay year one i'm going to be a stock analyst level one well year two i need to be a stock analyst level two maybe i'm going to switch and go into some type of pen testing in year three

and you can see how it will work right so if you have an idea of where you want to go either by job title or by salary then you can reverse engineer the entire plan and you can do this by doing research and what we call career interviews career interviews are so important and the thing is is that with all the technology we have today they're actually really accessible and when we say career interviews let's say you do want to be a ciso in five years and you have the experience now that puts you on a track to do that well then my recommendation is to start reaching out to i always say at least

three five is really ideal so you'd reach out to five different cisos and ask them for 15 minutes of their time you know historically we used to have to do this in a face-to-face world and i'm not talking about just 2020 before pandemic i'm talking about 15 18 years ago when i started coaching customers you would have to find people and you'd have to phone them up and you'd either have to do a phone interview or get them to take a meeting with you right now you don't have to do that now with all of the technology that we have you can reach out to individuals through linkedin or through a variety of associations for example the tampa bay ise squared

um association right you can find individuals that have these positions that you want and you can ask them for 20 30 minutes of their time the great thing that's going to come out of these meetings and what you want to obtain is what are the skills i need to be able to get to this role what type of education do i need to get to this role and what type of experiences do i need to get to this role and i'd like to ask all of the individuals the same general questions i have them planned out ahead of time you do want to make sure that you're incredibly respectful of everyone's time so if you say 20

minutes you want to keep it to 20 minutes and there is a great book called the professional 20 minute networking plan i think the book is called if you are interested um drop it in the chat or whatever and i'll find the exact name and drop it in for you before the session is done but it's a great book and it really does outline how to keep your networking to 20 minutes exactly works really great so once you're having these interviews and you're asking the same questions at the end you're going to cross compare all of the data that you have and then you want to reflect on your current skill set and what's possible for you

now a lot of times customers will come back to me and say you know what suzanne it's not possible i'm not going to really get to that role for me because i interviewed 10 people and they all had master's degrees and personally i don't want to go back to school and get a master's degree that's okay but if you don't do the exercise of interviewing individuals then you're never going to know what is realistic and you can't craft your own career and so this is really important as far as being able to come up with your plan and so let's say we are willing to go get a master's degree and by year or five we have that

master's degree we know in year one right now we can be researching these degrees that we're gonna need we know by year two we need to apply why because we know by year three we need to start because we know it's a three year program and by year five we have to have the degree conferred so that we would indeed be qualified for these roles that we want right and maybe it's not a degree degrees aren't necessarily everything right i live in the world of continuing education super important but what skills do you need to add on maybe you figure out in your career research information that you need to have very strong communication skills

well that tells us maybe we should join toastmasters and we should become certified toastmaster presenters and certified toastmaster leadership whatever the credential is called and you can plan on when to do that by having all of the skills that you need both hard and soft then you can actually plan out how are you going to obtain these skills are there grants available that you can get these skills and we're very fortunate in tampa bay there are a lot of training grants available that you could apply for if you qualify they could pay for you to upskill sometimes with no money out of pocket so i do have more info on that too if you want it

but you'll be able to tell okay i need to take soft skills classes and hard skills classes to be able to get to where i want to go and the great thing about having this plan is that if you are working when you sit down with your supervisor or your boss or whomever it is and they say well what do you want to improve this year you're not leaving it up to them you are in control of your own destiny because you know where it is that you want to go and again want to be really clear you can do this by saying you know what this is the salary i want to be at because i

don't really know what job titles i want or you can do it by job title because i'm passionate about a certain specific whatever that may be and the beautiful thing is that this works in any industry yes i happen to specialize in it right i work with it professionals all day every day but this works in any industry so let's move on so when we come to actually creating our career success plan you really want to have a positioning statement for yourself so you know of course based on where you are today i want to make sure that you know suzanne within suzanne in five years is going to have the skills and the necessary

experience to be the ciso in a small company with you know maybe 20 employees focusing on the finance industry something like that now having that positioning statement tells me a lot of information right it tells me the industries that i want to start really branding myself in and we're going to talk about branding in just a minute really branding myself as far as being maybe really good in the finance industry as far as my my cyber security or my tech skills or whatever when you're doing your planning one thing i always always always coach on is make sure you're googling alternative job titles and this is really important you know 22 years ago job titles were

all really pretty flat they were static they were the same a help desk specialist was a help desk specialist in almost every company today there's all kinds of amazingly creative new titles right and so i always suggest making sure that you're googling you know alternative job titles for you know um a sock analyst or something like that you'd be surprised what you'd come up with i'm not so sure about cyber security if the job titles are as fluid as they are in maybe other industries but even a simple google as far as alternative job titles for cloud technician will give you a lot of different possible job titles i always like to have some type of

industries that my customers are targeting as far as their career success when someone says any industry that's really hard and sometimes people will say to me i mean but what i do is kind of the same in every industry and i'm calling uh no way on that not today maybe 20 years ago possibly but not today industries are so specific and there's so much disruption going on across so many different industries that you really do want to find somewhere that you really can specialize in and become that you know thought leader within the finance industry for cyber security or within you know if it's bitcoin or cryptocurrency or whatever it is that you want to focus on

by having your industry and job titles and knowing where you want to be in five years you can really start to reverse engineer and target the companies that you want to work for so let's say you want to work in a fortune 500 company you know within five years these are the companies that i want to work in and you can set yourself up by actually you know sharing information on linkedin if that's your thing or by creating articles that could be published in magazines whether that's in a pin name or your name it doesn't matter if you want to move around like maybe you're here in college in tampa bay and it's amazingly beautiful

but maybe you want to go back to the northeast so be with your family after that's okay and then types of employers when we say that when we talk about types of employers some people want to work in a startup right some people want to work in fortune 500 companies it's perfectly fine the whole point of planning your career success is coming up with where do you want to be in five years reverse engineering that and then having a plan for yourself don't leave your destiny in somebody else's hands all right so when we talk about you know career planning and coming up with what skills we need and all that we have to kind of know what we have

today right and so we need to assess where we are and i like to use the swot and i know swats are super popular in business i'm sure quite a few of us on the call today have done swots as far as where can we move the company into or something like that right but they're actually really good for your career so when we talk about swats we talk about strength weaknesses opportunities and threats right generally your internal where you it's about you as a person are your strengths and your weaknesses what are your strengths what are your weaknesses and then when we talk about swats we talk about opportunities and threats being external outside right something that

maybe you don't control the goal is you don't have to show this to anybody okay you can do this by yourself so that nobody ever has to see it but you really want to take your strengths and match them to the opportunities okay so if my strength is i'm really great communicating then if one of the opportunities is maybe in the cyber security arena there's a lot of opportunities to present and become a thought leader well i can match that strength of i communicate well to the opportunity and so you just want to look at where can i take my strengths and really match them to opportunities and since we have weaknesses this is your opportunity

to control your career success look at those weaknesses and try to convert them to a strength so if i lack experience for example can i start volunteering can i start signing up for additional opportunities at um at my company different projects can i sign up to be in a leadership position on one of the local cyber security associations or can i volunteer at some type of cyber security organization right and then i like to look at threats are really external okay so like one of the popular threats always is disruption right what's coming down the pipeline that you're not thinking of that somebody else really is when it comes to threats they're outside of your control

okay but there's a great book that dale carnegie wrote called how to stop worrying and how to start living his really popular book is the how to win friends and influence people right um read in almost every b school around the country one that's not so popular is the how to stop worrying and how to start living it's a great book one of the premises in that book is and i have taken this with me and i coach to this all the time if something's worrying you if you know that it's a threat well then let's look at what is the worst possible scenario and we can plan for that worst possible scenario so let's say

one of the threats that you know is your industry is going to get disrupted maybe you're really reading about different types of texts that are coming down the pipeline and you know one of them is going to hit it big well what other industries are similar to yours that you could switch your career to if need be or could you adjust your career to that particular type of disruption so looking at the threats trying to mitigate you know how can we control these threats or can we convert the threats to opportunities so maybe there is a possible disruption coming right maybe there's a a new tech that you've been playing with or you're really involved in certain you

know forward thinking associations that really do have a lot of information well you can start turning that into an opportunity by you know i'm gonna be ready when it does happen that i'll be positioned as one of the few who does have a higher level skill set with this particular tech or whatever it may be all right so i do have some resources available usually if we were in person this is where i would hand them out but i have a career planning guide i have a career path worksheet i'm going to drop my email and my linkedin into the chat and then you guys can just email me or reach out to me if you want

me to email them to you if you are in the job search we do have a job searching career marketing plan worksheet that i'm absolutely happy to share as well i know everybody is in a different position and today we are talking about career success right so to really have career success and be in control of your career success whether you're employed or not you really want to sit down and think about what do you want to accomplish in 2021 2022 and then five years seven years i have some customers that do 10 years right you really want to go into goal setting and some things to know about goals one a goal has to be controlled by you

for it to be able to be accomplished and so when i say that okay an example of a goal not controlled by you would be i want to find a job within the first three months of 2021. well that's not controlled by you or by me well why well to get a job i need someone else to offer me a job right and that may not be possible maybe nobody wants to offer me a job i'm sure you're an absolutely phenomenal candidate but maybe they don't want to offer you a job maybe there isn't an opportunity it's not controlled by you an example of a goal that you could employ that is controlled by you is i want to increase

my network by 50 meaningful relationships you can go out and you can meet 50 people you can take those relationships and build them to a more trusted level right by following up by having coffees virtual coffees if you're not comfortable in the face-to-face world joining associations you can add on 50 people within three months or four months if you choose to right so when we're talking about setting goals for a career we do want to make sure that they are controlled by us goals also want to follow the smart philosophy right you want them to be specific measurable achievable relevant and time-bound we do have a goal-setting worksheet so just let me know if that's what you

want if you'd like to um have any worksheets that will help you again i'm happy to share so when when we come to career success we have our plan okay we're assuming we have a plan at this point there's always going to be strategies and tactics when you're implementing your career success plan strategies i think of as the overall um thing that we're going to be doing right so let's just use the example the strategy would be networking networking is my strategy my tactic is going to be the specific tactical items that i'm going to do to reach my whatever my overall goal is in using the strategy of networking so for example my tactic would be i'm going

to rsvp for five different networking events right without being able to rsvp i can't attend them let's just say right of course you could always show up we know that so just remember you have strategies and tactics so now we're going to look at some what i consider more out of the box strategies for really hitting your defined career success so one you want to make sure that we talked about having a five-year plan you want to make sure you're staying on track you need to keep checking your plan and so here's the thing about career success the definition will change it should change and i hope it changes you know there was a time in my life

um i was coming out of the university of miami with my bachelor's degree and i just thought to myself wow if i could get a job making fifty thousand dollars my whole world would just be roses and rainbows there'd be no more issues in the world right well quickly when i came out of the university of miami i realized well that's not really that much and i need to have a higher level career success goal right and so your goal is going to change and it should change but one thing that you need to do is you need to keep checking your plan i like to coach on the strategy of checking your plan if you can check it quarterly that's

great i say quarterly knowing that you'll probably check it twice a year so i set in my calendar quarterly reminders to check my plan to make sure that i'm moving forward so let's talk about other things we can do to make sure that we're really assessing and we're really reaching our goals in career success i like to talk about the you know the attitude of gratitude keeping a gratitude journal for me it's all about a positive mindset there is not an employer out there a recruiter or anyone that wants to hire a negative person i am assuming if you're making a five-year career plan you want to progress in your career right i if you want to stay in the same exact

level perfectly okay but by developing a positive mindset and you can do that by honestly just keeping a gratitude journal and so what i do is throughout the month i mean i don't do this every day but i jot down the things that make me happy that i'm proud of like for example talking today to you is going to go in my gratitude journal tonight why because at the end of the year i can reflect and say wow look at all of this that you've accomplished or even at the end of the month or the end of the quarter or when i get down which it happens because i'm human too i can look back and i can go wow okay

you know what today's a pretty crappy day no doubt check but wow look at all this stuff i did in the last month i can get back to this and so keeping a gratitude journal will really help do that and then journaling your day you know really writing down what did you accomplish what did you not accomplish and how did you feel about it this self-reflection activity will give you a lot of power as far as planning where you want to be in career success this is one of the things that i think has helped customers the most is when they start journaling their days and it also gives them a lot of ideas as

far as things that they can use in branding techniques right so that's interesting i learned about this today you know what i could write an article on that and put it out there we talked about already writing your goals down really important something i really encourage everyone and this can be your significant other it can be your wife your husband it can be your your sibling it could be your best friend but get a goal buddy sit down with somebody and pay this information forward right to hey you know what let's come up with a career plan where do we want to be in the next five years my husband and i do this every year at

the end of the year through the beginning of the year i will tell you sometimes i set goals for him but you know what he appreciates it and he goes ahead and implements them too and at the end us being able to hold each other accountable to hit our goals really does make a difference and there have been years where we haven't done it and i gotta tell you i come to halfway through the year and i'm like oh my goodness why do i feel like i'm not accomplishing anything this year why because i didn't have a plan and i didn't have anybody to hold me accountable so do get a goal buddy that will help

you tremendously celebrate your small victories this is something that i've found in coaching for the last 22 years that most individuals we just overlook all of our great accomplishments so for me for my kids for my family for my for those who i coach i always make sure that we celebrate their wins for 24 hours ride that high i say forget your losses within 24 minutes absolutely but celebrate your wins you know when you hit that skill set that you needed to take a notch up and you're going to start looking for that next roll or you're going to put your name in the hat for the promotion make sure that your victories are one documented which we talked about in

the journaling right and your attitude of gratitude will help you to have a positive attitude about this but why i say celebrate our small victories for no less than 24 hours what i've noticed over the years is that a lot of times people can't even talk to their own victories other people can talk to the most amazing things that you've done but we often will overlook them okay so by celebrating our victories writing them down journaling them reflecting back on them it will help us be the best cheerleaders for ourselves that we can be and help us move up that notch in our career success plan as we're going so do celebrate your victories set a goal you know what when you get

that cissp go out with a buddy and you know what you have fun all right a vision board vision boards are they can be a lot of different things okay but vision boards are essentially a pictorial representation of what it is you want to accomplish and this can be a literal representation of what you want to accomplish like maybe you want a bigger house with a white picket fence well take a board i um i do mine on cockboards but you're welcome to do them on poster board you can do them on an eight and a half by eleven piece of paper if you're graphically inclined and you wanna draw that's fine but keep it in front of you vision

boards help keep you on track to where it is you want to be so if you want that ciso job well then you find an image somewhere maybe that's the ciso that you want to be and pin it up on a board where you can look at it every single day studies show that if you are able to view see what it is that you want to accomplish you're more likely to accomplish it so not having a vision board can really hold you back and can stop you from hitting your career success milestones so i love that if i can't see it if i can see it i can remember it right so the reverse of that if i can't see it i

can't remember it all right remove negativity this is something so important if you have a friend or you have someone in your life that is negative you gotta find a way to either help them become positive or you have to remove negativity from your life because being able to progress forward negativity will hold you back i have seen it time and time again my customers who you know i have customers who maybe one doesn't have as great of a skill as another one but that one with lesser skill it has a positive mindset has an attitude of gratitude and they will get so many more opportunities than my customer who possibly has a negative mindset

and negativity comes out in a lot of ways right it comes out in word choice it comes out in body language it comes out in you know facial expressions and then it comes out in words too so do try to remove negativity and you can start if you yourself if you're seeing yourself reflecting going well i'm kind of negative but i don't want to tell her that that's okay too you don't have to tell me but one thing i will say is you can choose two peop to be positive okay that is a choice we all make create your environment and so when i say that i say you know what control what goes on

around you when i meet individuals and i say you know hey so what do you want to do in five years or what type of opportunity are you looking for and they say well i don't know whatever it doesn't matter to me that to me is like a huge red flag and to every other recruiter in the world as well because we want to know what it is you're looking for right so you can create your environment yourself by choosing your goals by mapping out your plan by using the tiered success and then controlling negativity around you you know i um so in my training center everything is positive there's positive affirmations everywhere you go and in my

house too right so you can choose to create your environment all right regularly assessing your progress so we talked about this in the beginning overall monthly evaluations would be awesome quarterly at the very least please do it at least twice a year what i find is when i have my goals that i've set for my career progress or my career success if i'm checking them at least quarterly then i can stay on track right even at least twice a year for me i try to read i very much believe if you want to lead you got to read i try to read 50 to 52 books a year that's one a week sometimes i say 50 a year because i know

during the holidays i'm gonna fall behind but i also try to start really early in the year and i try to front load a lot of my reading just so when the tail end of the year comes and i'm completely overwhelmed with holiday stress i don't get down on myself but i find i keep a list and i journal all the books that i'm reading and sometimes i'll put my thoughts on some of the books because the truth is by the end of the year i may not even remember what that book was about if it didn't make a big enough impact on me right and then people will ask me well what books do you recommend and things like

that but when i check in let's say quarterly and i notice oh you know what i've only read you know 10 books this quarter i'm never going to hit my goal if i don't stay on track and that's what regularly assessing your progress can do for you more than anything you have to want your career success and this is where it comes to for me knowing what is your definition of career success not the definition that your parents gave you i had a customer once who his family wanted him to become a doctor well he never wanted to be a doctor and that was really hard although he applied to medical school he went through

you know getting his degrees in i think it was biology or microbiology or one of those degrees that would set him up to be a doctor but at the end of the day he never wanted it and he was negative and so unhappy and then he figured out what he did like he liked technology he wanted to be in i.t and when he found that path he achieved his definition of career success so do determine what is your definition so that you can reverse engineer it and go from there so in review because i know i have 45 minutes and i want to be able to answer questions if anybody has any today but for review create or update your

five-year plan if you want worksheets just reach out to me i'm happy to share create your strategies and tactics that will work for you today we talked about some out of the box strategies um not necessarily you know start branding yourself post on linkedin twice a day but we have those two as well and then create your smart goals right making sure they're specific they're measurable attainable they're related and time bound right and then stay motivated and use the 10 goal strategies that we talked about today so with that again i am suzanne ricci my email is on the screen which is suzanne computercoach.com it's pretty simple it's suzanne with one z two ends i'll put it in the chat in just

a minute you can follow me on twitter i do run the tampa bay technology career advice meetup we host all kinds of events through that meetup job search strategies career success strategies i host a career success coffee talk every monday where we just crowd source solutions to what's going on in your career um you can follow computer coach on facebook twitter on linkedin as well with that i'm going to stop my share i have to get back to i'm gonna stop my share and oh i think i did stop my share did that stop okay i hope so and with that i'm gonna need to thank you joseph um again i had to be in powerpoint to see what i

was doing so okay so what advice do you have for tackling imposter syndrome when you reach a big career goal you know kelly that is huge right imposter syndrome just so in case anybody's not familiar with it right not feeling like you're good enough to do something um journaling your accomplishments kelly will help tremendously with that right and that's where and i had a very real situation where i um co-present with um erica woods from apex systems i don't know if anybody knows her but she's lovely so i co-present with her on career success and we co-present a couple times a year together okay in one year erica had to write our bios for the bio screen

and it was really funny because when she sent it to me to approve i read it and i went i do all that oh my goodness wow that's really impressive right because it's so easy to feel like i'm not good enough i really don't know what i'm doing but one know what you know okay everybody suffers from imposter syndrome at some time someday everybody has a down day okay so one know what you know okay two journal your accomplishments it's so important i mean i i mean full transparency here fall on and off of journaling like every other person in the world okay when i journal my accomplishments it's so much easier to know what i know

okay and then also you know there was a time in my life where i was really down on myself and positive affirmations i had positive affirmations that i wrote out on index cards and i found myself in a situation personally not professionally but personally that really i wasn't sure if i was coming or going personally and so i had these positive affirmations with me everywhere i went and if i had any self-doubt i just literally would whip out my index cards if i was in line at the grocery store if i was i'd pull over if i was driving if it started to creep in i would just pull over and these positive affirmations helped me

tremendously so journaling so that you can reflect back on what it is you know you know and then you know for me also i feel like sometimes with imposter syndrome it creeps in because i think we need to keep a schedule of upskilling and that is super important to me and obviously core to what i do but i do it because it's super important to me and i feel like if we're constantly upskilling well then imposter syndra will also be able to suppress imposter syndrome because we are constantly growing and learning i feel like imposter syndrome sometimes creeps in where it's like you know like you know what i haven't really done anything in that topic

in like you know five months maybe this person really does know more than me or something like that like for example to give you an idea i apply for jobs for fun why well i coach people who want to find employment so if i don't know the process then it would be really difficult for me okay do you practice presenting often um well i hope that's a yes is the answer joseph i hope that wasn't a question because i need more practice but i am always practicing um i present on tuesdays through computer coach we have a career a job success series i present every tuesday a different webinar on a job search topic which you can find them on our

tampa bay technology career advice meetup and then i host a guest speaker series for career success every friday through computer coach i do host a job success support group on thursdays for job seekers and then i also hold a career success coffee talk and i love to present at different conferences i'm constantly filling out the call for speakers because i really like it so i hope that that was a question because i hope i'm doing an okay job here today what would be a cool tool or set of tools available on the internet to evaluate our swot you know what that's a great question and i don't know how i feel about evaluating because that's incredibly

self-reflective the swot as far as a career tool is it's really a self-reflective tool so i don't know if i would recommend pinning it against an evaluation tool i've never done that i'm gonna write that down to look into it um i don't know who's asking what questions so you are more than welcome to ping me if you feel comfortable and we can talk about that offline and do some research on it but my initial gut is it's so self-reflective that i would be concerned with what another tool would say what i do think is really important is part of those career success interviews as far as i want to be a pen tester what skills do i really need what

credentials do i really need you know certifications are coming up all the time some are coming in some are coming out what are the ones that are out there that are really reputable you can do that through interviewing and also i think what i left out but really important is through um research you know being able to go and read from the different associations that are supporting these credentials or bringing these credentials out or what skills you know there's so many resources out there today um what's the best book you've read this year okay this year um you know that so i just finished and this i do a lot of audio books i have an

article on my linkedin on how i found nine hours a week to read and i get asked quite a bit so this year so in my audible because i do a lot of audio books i listen when i'm walking or when i'm not with my kids so don't anybody mommy shoot me um and somebody recommended the four agreements by don miguel ruiz i don't know if anybody's read that but has nothing to do with tech it's total self-help book but it was a great book and it's super small it's really deep so i'm definitely going to be listening to it a couple times but the four agreements by don miguel ruiz was a great book um i also have started

following a couple years ago somebody named robin sharma who he um he wrote um the monk who sold his ferrari you may have heard of that one that's pretty popular but he has some various things and then i am reading one right now because i deal with a lot of job seekers and i deal with a lot of imposter syndrome and people getting down and had to be resilient in your job search it's called on yourself so i'm about an hour into that book that's the one i'm reading actually right now um trying to look at what else so far this year oh super engaged is good traction is another traction's actually a one i really

really liked all right so i hope that helps does anybody have any questions all right so i will hang out in the networking tables if anybody wants to come ask a question privately i know i was told i had 45 minutes and i'm at a minute over so i'm happy to see and answer questions for you or network grow let me i'm going to put my email in the chat all right so there's my email and i'm gonna drop my linkedin in as well feel free to connect with me