Career Choices

So you've decided maybe you like this whole #Citrix thing. What are your #Career options? Join DJ Eshelman as he walks you thru his 4 (of 6) basic Success Lanes for IT roles in Citrix. What roles do you see yourself being most successful in?

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Video Highlights

 02:12: The first option you probably have. the most likely is. if you are a part of a service desk or a help desk. and you are going to become a subject matter expert.

03:28: The service desk or the administration lanes is what I call maintain or manage.

04:16: There's various schools of thought on how many administrators the environment should have, and it kind of really depends on the diversity of the user population, how many different types of use cases there are, and overall population in general.

05:39: When you're charged with building tasks, you're more of that engineer, the Citrix engineer, which means that you are tasked with taking a design and usually taking a design and putting that into action by applying leading practices to making the design work. And so your actual desire is putting out the servers and configuring them and doing all those kinds of behind the scenes work that's kind of outside of a production environment.

06:25: Engineers are tasked with things like upgrades and things like that, whereas the administrators would be more in that case, tasked with changes to the desktops themselves or maintaining the servers for Windows updates and that sort of thing.

06:53: Usually I recommend that before somebody considers themselves to want to do a Citrix engineer job, you really need a good two or three years of IT experience before you even try and go into that because you need to understand the complexities of not only Citrix but all the systems that are surrounding that.

08:08: A lot of times you'll also see an engineer that will be tasked with the maintenance of several things, including Citrix. This is where you have your senior engineer general titles. They are tasked with a lot of different things and they're usually doing a combination of delegating work, supervising work and doing work within a project.

06:53: Usually I recommend that before somebody considers themselves to want to do a Citrix engineer job, you really need a good two or three years of IT experience before you even try and go into that because you need to understand the complexities of not only Citrix but all the systems that are surrounding that.

08:48: Then you get into other engineering types that are very often associated with sales roles, where you have a sales engineer or something like that, tasked with figuring out the needs for our customer and showing them through a proof of concept. They usually have to build out a demonstration of the technology.

10:14: The architect is the person who takes the use case needs that are identified and translates them into a design or a plan that can be implemented either by others or sometimes even by themselves.

10:40: [architect] a lot of the time they have a lot of soft skills that wouldn't necessarily be considered. I'm talking about things like making a presentation to management or making quality documentation. Those kinds of soft skills are usually something that you need as well as the technical skills to be an architect.

11:14: You might be part of an organization as an architect and have kind of a consultancy role, where you're really more of a person that is almost more of a business leader than anything else in the IT organization; where you are constantly aware of the business needs and making sure that they are being met by the technology. This is your CTO path of a person, whereas somebody, in the administration or engineering, might take a path that's more administrative in nature. Usually what I find with people are in the architecture space is that they don't always like to be the people that are responsible for staff, but most of the time they are someone who needs to be, at least a thought leader in that regards.

13:05: You have people that are just really considered experts and these are the people that reach beyond just the workplace or just what they do and are known for the technology in their lives.

14:00: Then you have the final success lane that I have defined, which I call the authority. These are the people that have kind of taken the next level of expert, to where they are considered an authority in the technology and a certain area of the technology specifically like application delivery or network.

15:06: [experts] it's kind of vetted by the public, by you, and of who is considered an authority in the marketplace and who is not kind of thing

PDF Transcript

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