I'm Will Lucas and black Tag Green Money. Did you know this podcast was nominated for an Double ACP Image Award? But we are and I need your support. The double a CP has opened up the opportunity for the public. That means you to weigh in and vote on our category. And the opportunity for you to vote ends this Friday, So head over to vote dot Double ACP Image Awards dot net. Scrolled to the Podcast and Outstanding News and Information Podcast category and vote for black Tag Green Money.
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have a college degree. This non profit organisations like one ten a thing to constant of the audience, Shout out to one ten all these fortunate for our hundred copies that dropping the dequirement that have a cost to gree be because since the pandemic kid. One point four million people haven't stopped going to college and that enroll those enrollment numbers are dropping. And the reason why isn't because
college isn't important. What people are starting to shift towards the outcomes driven education bottel and it's not just about did you graduate to get a certificate? Did this education
get you a job? I'm Will Lucas and this is Black Tech, Green Money, afro Techo Austin, Texas, our very young Tearran pod rails on the main stage at afro Tech talking with Ruben Harris, who's co founder and CEO at Career Karma, and Sydney Sampson black Well, an engineer who came through the Career Karma programming about how to better prepare ourselves for the changing demands of the workforce.
Career Karma is technology what helps match students with educational opportunities like boot kids, so we're better prepared for product and technical careers. Let's listen to the discussion. Hi, everybody, I'm Taran Powdrew. I am the director of People Operations for Blevity, and I'm really excited to be here with Ruben and Sydney today to talk about rescaling and breaking into tech. UM. So we have a lot to cover.
We're gonna jump right in. UM. So, Ruben, can you start with just giving us the backstory on a career karma for those that don't know what is career karma and how did it come to be? Yeah, So career Comma gives product led career guidance for people or for workers that are seeking skills, peers, colleges, mentorships, job opportunities, but even ongoing career training after they're employed. UM. It's a product that we wish that we had when we were breaking in the tech when we realized that you
can get jobs that pay six figures without going into college. UM, that was pretty interesting to me. Before career karma, UM, everybody wanted to break into finance. So there's things like breaking into Wall Street, UM, merging and inquisitions and we started a podcast called Breaking into Startups UM. And and that's how it all starts. The product that we wish that we had when we recommence set All right, UM, and Sydney, I know that you actually utilized career karma
to break in attack yourself. Can you tell us about your backstory and what led you to a career Karma perfect. Hello everyone, So I'm sitting me from East Stokland, California. Uh, I have had a long life. Um, I feel like my life is long. I feel like I'm an o G already. I'm only twenty four. I've been taking care of myself since I was sixteen. So the last eight years have been some of the longest, most hardest, and
challenging times of my life. But now so um yeah, So I think back in twenty nineteen is when I fell upon career Karma and I met Reuben. And up until I found career Karma, I was outside during door dash delivering for Postmates, delivering for Instacart, caviar Um, every single app that you can think about to make money
in the Bay Area. I was doing it and I needed to figure out, you know, how can I use my skill set, my entrepreneur mindset to you know, get to a point where I don't have to work all the time. I could smile. You know, I can wake up happy about going to my job, and I can do things that not only motivate me, but motivate other people. So right, I think the day when I found a career Karma app, I was actually working as a SNA.
So I went from delivering, you know, delivering food and to working in the hospital as a SIENNA and I was just like, this is not it. I'm not happy here. I got so much more to offer to the world and I just wanted to figure it out. My friends sent me the Career Karma app. I downloaded it and I've been with grouping never since. All Right, so I know that squads are a core component of what Career Karma offers. Can you tell us about squads? What are
squads and why are they important? Yeah? So there's there's a few things that are important in career KMMA. So when someone like Sydney comes to Career Comma there they're looking for new skills. And the problem is that there's thousands of job training programs that exist. So the first thing that we provide is matching, UM to talk about it in the second so as we match you too a program. UM that can be very overwhelming because UM, as you're trying to go through interviews, it's hard to
know you know what to ask in the interview. UM, it's hard to know who else in your neighborhood and in East Oakland, UM is actually going through this process as well. So rather than putting you into this huge network of thousands of people and the app, we actually focus on small groups. So the short answer is a squad is a small group. We actually connected the peers,
coaches and mentors and and live audio rooms. Um. And so what the squad is essentially is a peer group of people that are enrolled in job training programs that help you stay psychologically motivated while you're enrolled going through a program. And Sydney actually created one of the first squads in Career Karma so that um, after they graduate, they could also find jobs since most jobs are offline
and come to a frall. So this peer group stays with you during the program and then also when you're looking for a job, they let you know about opportunities that are not websites. Okay, and what would you say are some of the core skills that you would look for in a squad mentor like what makes the squad mentor impactful? Yeah, so there's a UM. The squad concept also was inspired by uh this concept called the mobile.
So it's a really good article in New York Times called the Power of Positive People, and so UM it's about Okinawa, Japan, and it's where women live, the oldest in the world. And the idea is it's easier to go through life if you have a safety net. So as a squad leader, you're someone that essentially is going to make sure that you hold it down for your people no matter what if they have a question that if they're they're seeking guidance, you're gonna look out for them.
And in order to do that, you have to be a very good communicator. If you're having a hard day, you still have to be able to put a smile on your face to make sure that they stay motivated as well. Um, you have to make sure they're not just connected to educational resources, to financial resources. You might have to help them find housing or financial um innovative things like that. So those are some of the key elements. Okay,
so that's a good segue. Sydney. Can you tell us about your experience forming the squad that you formed and how that impacted your experience? Perfect? So, as I mentioned, I started in Career Karma. I think it was maya, twent nineteen, So I remember the first day I downloaded the app. There's so much going on I'm hearing all these topics stuff that I don't know, you know, what is going on? What is this? What is HTML right? What is JavaScript? Um? Like? What is all of these things?
And it didn't make sense to me. So Ruben had this thing where, you know, we can all go to a live zoom call. We could connect with other people all around the world who were also interested in the same thing. We connected, shared our stories and I was like, all right, boom, I got my squad. I'm gonna call my squad young and Ambitious, because we're all young and ambitious, striving, you know, to change the world. And I think one of my first members is in the audience somewhere, miss
Danielle Madri who uh but yeah. We formed this group together back in twenty nineteen, and I think as of right now we're hitting about we're a little over thirty jobs right now that we have landed across our squad um. Not only do we help folks get jobs, we help folks level up at their current job. We help folks pass their interviews, We do resume reviews, we do open source projects. Everything you can think of to level up, break into the industry, or get to the next level.
My squad is doing it right now and we've been doing it for the last three years. I mean, name some of the companies where people got jobs and what roles they had, so Boom Mamatic Centure. UM. I think the first job Danielle had she was at get Lab. My sister Lanie was at New Cella. UM. I got two people that got hired at Lows. UM, I got
another guy, a couple of people that was at Twitter. UM. We we just be all over the place right and when people see why and they walk in the room, they know who we are and they know what we're standing for. That's amazing. UM. So, Sydney, can you talk to us about how having this squad impacted your experience as you went through boot camp? Like I said, the boot camp was very hard, and it was like if I didn't have my family to me, I don't know
how I would have made it. Like there were many nights where a lot of us were trying to pass projects or trying to pass lads. We didn't know what to do or we would get into, you know, come into a roadblock. And I had some of my Wayne folks that would be online all night. So it'd be like twelve midnight and I'm posting the Slack channel. Yo, I ran into an issue. This project is due tomorrow. Who can come online right now and help me out?
And I know that there's been several people that we didn't stayed up all night working through errors together, working through bugs together, and now like exactly exactly we cried. Some of us wanted to give up. Um. I remember during the boot camp. I think in the beginning we were all like, we can't do this, this is too much. Yeah, and Ruben was like, y'all started this for a reason, Like y'all got your family, Like y'all not doing it
by yourself. So if you have a friend, you have a community, it makes it a little bit easier when you run into those bugs because you've got somebody to lend on. Yeah, okay, And were there any particular skills that you felt like translated well from your prior experience into the text base that was okay? Yeah. So I think one of the main things that help me get to where I am now is that I've always been an entrepreneur. I've been an entrepreneur since high school. I
started building businesses in high school. I think the very first business I built was a cleaning company. And I was sixteen and seventeen cleaning houses for software engineers and data scientists in San Francisco, and I was just like, Okay, I have all of these skills. I know how to run a company. I know how to you know, manage people, I know how to manage teams. Now I need to bridge all of those things into what I'm doing right
now in technology. Quick question, did everybody that get those jobs? Did they all go to college? Nope. I didn't go to college either. I think I I was in the middle of my college degree when I found you, and I started becoming a career coach at Career Karma and realized that people that are not saying that college is a bad thing. I'm not gonna tell you all that because I want everybody to get educated. I want everybody to do what's for them right. But for me, it
was a lot going on. I was working three jobs and trying to go to school, where when I found a boot camp, they're like, Okay, you can do part time. You can still keep your jobs. We are asking you for no money. You don't got to pay no tuition. We want you to learn these skills and get a job, and when you get a job, then you can start paying us back. Sign me yet. Yeah, that's a great pivot point because I want to talk a little bit about what's going on, you know, kind of more at
the macro level. Um. So there have been a lot of shifts in the post secondary education market, particularly in the last couple of years. UM, can you talk to us about that, Reuben, what's going on in the post secondary education market? Yeah? I mean you you've heard sudainly talked about bootcasts multiple times, and like she said, it's not just about bootcapts first colleges. Um. There's a really good article called the post secondary education market is Unbundling.
So there's there's Bootcaster, there's colleges. There's corporate led courses like Google Certificates. There's non degree courses like e Cornell. There's massive open online courses like Cours Sera UM. But everyone, every employer is pretty much dropping the requirement to have a college degree. There's nonprofit organizations like one ten. I think to contests in the audience out out to one ten.
All these fortunate companies are dropping the requirement to have a cost degree because since the pandemic hit one point four million people have stopped going to college and that enrolled. Those enrollment numbers are dropping. And the reason why it isn't because college isn't important, but people are starting to shift towards the outcomes driven education model and it's not just about did you graduate and get a certificate? Did this education get to a job. Sidney has been talking
a lot about Bootcasts. Book has pioneered short form outcomes driven education that is relevant for today's students. Most students aren't eighteen year olds. There thirty five plus with kids that can't go to schools full time. So even if you make education free, you actually can go to school. So you need part time and self pace options. But most schools aren't free, and so there's a lot of
innovation happening with how you pay for education. So Sydney was able to take advantage of something called an income share agreement. There's things like their tuition, but these days there's now employers that are paying for your college and on the job training and starting to be a big deal. So long story short, um, the education system will continue unbundling. It won't just be every day that I mentioned. There will be individuals training people, um, launching their own courses. Um,
there's organizations like reforge and on date that exists. Why Combinator is an education institution, so UM that optionality, those stacks of course are going to also create more difficulties in choosing where you want to go to school, which is this process by analysis, which is why matching to the right education matters, and why one education system won't train the entire world, and why you need some some
some kind of directory. Yeah, so there's a lot of opportunity then for people who are seeking a post secondary education. How should people be strategically thinking about how they invest in their education? I mean, I think it's really important to understand, like why are you signing up for education? I think most people that are going to school And some people will disagree with me on this, and that's okay, Um, is you're going to school to get a job in
more money. Um. And for a lot of people, even after they graduate, whatever they studied and they're actually not using it in their employment. And so if I were you and you're trying to figure out where you want to go to school, I would ask them how many people have gotten jobs in the role that you want. Um, do they have an online or part time self pace options. This is really important because some people will say online education isn't for me. But after the pandemic hit, the
remote work genie came out of the bottle. I mean, people are here at Avro Tech, so shout out to Afro Tech. But for the last two years this was all in the metaverse, right, That's what helped it survive. But now employers have to provide either fully remote work options or hybrid remote work options. So you actually don't have a choice but to learn how to work with other people online. So if that's going to be the case and people are always going to be learning, then
you should probably find to learn. You should probably learn how to learn online because at some point in your life you're going to be educated in that way. In
my opinion. UM. Third, it's important to find a cohort of people that are like you, that are going through this as well, because you're not always going to be able to cry on the shoulder of your teachers, like you'll be able to ask your teachers questions, but also your teachers might have limited amounts of time and especially as the world, because of world global because of remote work, you're not going to have that peer group of people
that are going to help you along the way. And then finally you have to decide that you really want this, because I promise you, if you're trying to do anything that's hard, you're gonna feel like quitting and you're gonna have to psychologically put yourself to go through this. Career navigation isn't about education. Career navigations about psychology. So you have to decide first today. All right, well, Sydney, can you tell us about some of the factors that you
considered when you were weighing your options around post secondary education. Definitely, to me, it was all about my future, um, And it was like, I can either keep doing what I'm doing now, keep stressing, keep working hard, keep working two to three jobs, or I can imagine life ten years
from now. Imagine you know, the house I want, the family I want to build, Um, Imagine just getting up, going to go clock in to work, you know, having stand ups, then going out for lunch, being able to run Like we don't get those things in these you know, regular jobs, these regular nine to five working labor jobs. You don't get these luxuries right, Like, so the fact that tech it gives you that opportunity, like to do things that you've never been able to do before for
your family. Like right now, I finally got a house. I never had a house growing up. You know, like it feels so good. It feels so good that when I get paid, I can pay my bills and I don't have to worry about Okay, let me pay this bill, or let me eat top Romen for the night. You know, I don't gotta worry about those things because tech put everything in a place for me. So you gotta think
about yourself. You gotta think about what you want. You gotta think about your life ten years from now, twenty years from now, thirty years from now, forty years from now, Like you got to think about that, what do you want? Who do you want people to look at you as? What do you want people to look at you? You know when you walk in the room, Like all of that matters. And to me, like I said, I wanted to live luxury, so baby, I had to go get it all right, Uh, Ruben, can you talk to us
about the role that employers play. How do they fit into the post secondary education ecosystem. Yeah, I mean, I'll take a step back and talk about the segment employers. So before I mentioned a career common house, job training programs, find qualified applicanst we have about two and a half million people a month that come to us looking for career advice, mostly women and people of color. And UM, what's interesting about this whole phenomenon now is that employers
themselves wanted take an active role in people's education. UM. Sydney talked a lot about, um, the luxuries that education provides. And there's a lot of fear in the market right now, a lot of layoffs, there's there's a recession that's coming. Um. But what a lot of people forget is that benefits were introduced during the depression, during the the Roosevelt era to compete in the market. And so there's health care benefits, there's for one, key benefits, but there's also education benefits.
Now pretty much any employer can actually pay for your education. You know, the g I Bill which is available for veterans to pay for your education existed. So there's things like I says in the first tuition. But I know where Sydney works and at a lot of employers they will actually pay for your education. So there's actually a whole movement of people that are just going straight into education and the employer will either pay for your skills
training or your college action. There's a whole big phenomenon called UM stackable credentials. So sometimes you can choose to do a boot camp and get college credit, and if
you want to advanced to do college, you can. And so now Career Common started to work with employers UM providing product led career guidance for employees that want to continue up leveling their careers UM and and figure out how to get all these points solutions that they've invested in to talk to each other and really manage that experience and to end And why do you think that employers are kind of moving in this direction of like
pivoting away from kind of the more traditional educational benefits and going more in this direction. Here's here's a cool step that I just learned. So fifty of babies born in the last decade are going to live until a hundred and four. Fifty percent of the babies in the last decade are going to live until a hundred four.
What does that mean is that means that we're gonna switch from a three stage career where you go to uh school, work and retire to you know, fifty age fifty being the new thirty, right, so you're gonna actually be working longer, so you're gonna go to multiple schools and multiple companies in the lifetime, or if you decide to stay at the same company. You know, you saw
what happened with the Great Resignation. This is a weird recession where there's still a lot of open jobs, a lot of employers here that are hiring heavy, but they're also focused on retaining you because, like like Sydney said, a lot of the employers want to take care of you. And you can't take care of your people only by paying them good money, because you can get good money wherever you go. Right. So um, because technology is changing the world so crazy. Um, the skills that you have
will get outdated. I think the half life of the skill is like a year and a half or two years. So employers are really getting active and providing ongoing training to their people. But also community. Right. One of the early elements of community inside companies is e RG groups. There's a lot of RG groups represented here, and I think it's one of the biggest like examples of kind of a squad inside of a company that exists that isn't fully levelaged as much as it should be or
it could be. Um, some people do this well. I mean even when you have large employers that are not thought of as tech tech companies, like a big bank or a big logistics or truck and company, they're investing heavy and technology. But if you're heavy investing like driverless cars or in electric cars, or in robotics in the warehouse, what happens to all the other people? You know? You guys heard Mark Cuban yesterday talking about cost plus drugs.
You saw a big pharmacies investing in digital shutting down the retail stores. What happens to their people? Right? So for us, if you go to Career, Commedy, Constus Enterprise, you'll see it says every company is a tech company. Bring your people to the future with you. The way to bring your people to the future with you is by investing in their education, because all of us are students and need to always be learning. Um. All right, Sydney, is there anything that you would want to add to that?
Just from a perspective of why is this important for employers to do? Yeah, like I know right now, Like I said, I'm a software engineer UM at a centre. UM and Accenture is very much invested in us, right like we are their products. So if they can't you know, sell us and sell our skills, they don't make money. Right. So ever since I've been there, I think I didn't gotten like two to three certifications in the last year. For the last two months, I've been working on Google certifications,
AWS certifications. Everything they send me on my email, I'm signing up for it, right because what company do you know that's that much invested into their people? We all, day by day, you know, are trying to figure out what are we gonna do, how are we gonna feed our families? And then we find only get that job, and a lot of us like to take a break.
You know, we think just because we got the job that we're here, we don't have to keep learning, we don't have to keep getting up skilled and getting certified. And that's not true. So if you feel like that you got your job, and you feel like you made it and you can sit down, you should move over for somebody else because you wasting time. Right Like, you're there and you have these companies that are invested in you. The world is moving, like he said, right now. You know,
we're about to go into you know, a recession. People are getting laid off. So why would you get high You're at a company and choose to just sit down? Why would you choose to not keep learning? You know, keep getting educated, keep trying to reach to the top. You know, when I sit in meetings at Accenture and people are asking me about my experience and who I want to be, I'm telling everybody that's at the top, I want to be like you. I want to re
running you know, the company. I want to be sitting next to Julie Sweets in a few years, you know, like I want to be at the top. So show me what I gotta do to get to the top. If I gotta do to three four, five, seven, nineteen certifications a month to get there, then I'm gonna do it. It is what it is, but you gotta want it.
You gotta be hungry. And I think that's one thing that set me different when I came to career Karma, because I came hungry I came ready to win, I came ready to take over, and yeah, my brain is filled with knowledge and certifications right now. Well, speaking of being proactive, if you're at a company that doesn't offer these kinds of benefits or programs, what are some things Sydney that people can do proactively kind of on their own to come joinin? There? We go, there's there's there's
an option. Um, what are some things that people can do on their own to advance their skills? Find mentorship outside of a more formal program. I would say the number one thing is to find your community, find your people that you want to sit with, that you want to win with, that you want to be great with, and you guys come up with a plan of how you guys are going to get there. My entire squad we all went to boot camp together. The majority of us went to flat Earned School because we said that
we didn't want to do it alone. One of us got enrolled and it was like a boomerang effect. Right after one person got enrolled, the next one did, the next one, and then I remember at one point it was like eight of us in Flatterer and School at the same time, in different cohorts, but we were all able to you know, pivot off of each other, help bouncing the ideas off of each other, and still help
each other. So the number one thing is finding your community, finding the people you want to eat with and you want to win with. And then from there is now you know, maximizing the opportunity. See what's hot in the market right, See who you want to be if you're somebody right now, there's a recruiter right and you're seeing all of these, you know, other black engineers becoming engineers, and you're trying to figure out how they're doing it. Go sit down and have lunch with a black engineer.
See how they got to where they got, See what they're doing to keep their job, and see if you can even just you know, get ten minutes on their calendar a week just to talk to them and see what's that life like and how you can get there. But if you don't take that initiative, you're gonna be in that position or wherever you are, stuck forever. You gotta be the one to take that leap of faith.
And if you want to find that community and you want to get those skills to go to career coming out, call slash apply and will connection and then after you do that. Fine, all right, So Ruben, I want to talk about another player in the post secondary education market. Um, can you talk to us about the public sector and how they fit in? Yeah? Um, I think the public actor actually fits into also what you can do if
you're working out a company. So if you had a company that isn't paying for education, there is a tax code that exists, a tax code I see, so pretty much every employer can pay for your education is five thousand, two hundred fifty dollars um. It'll be tuition reimbursement, which still requires you to go out of pocket, but they will pay for education. So you can talk to your HR team and say, hey, do you offer education benefits? No? Well, I mean can you you know follow this task? Could
actually one twice seven? You can actually do this. Um. There's also a bill called the upskilling and reskilling coming out to double that amount as well. But a lot of employers are moving towards employer funded education because most people don't have that money in their pocket to be able to do it, so they'll pay for up front. So a quick way to do this action ADOM, go to the HR team, child them this and we can
figure it out. Going back to the public sector, UM, the public sector puts more into workforce development than the private sector ever will UM. You know, if you look at job Core, you look at GI Bill, you look at even just the funding for college, it's mostly coming from the government. I think student loans is like what what point seven one point eight trillion dollars now, UM, But it's clear that this has to change. That's why
you're hearing things like student loan forgiveness. You're starting to see these big like I think it's National Apprenticeship Week this week. But a lot of these initiatives from the public sector are very low volume. So you know, you're not going to really move the needle with like fifty
year hundred people. We need thousands of people, need millions of people, like we want to have a billion people in the next ten years, and so long story short, I think that if UM, if employers provide, if the public center house provide incentives for employers that want to invest in the education, for the employees and for the people that they want to attract, that's going to be
really important. Another thing that the employers can do is like really embrace uh technology training, provide free online WiFi access, give devices to people. We actually have a campaign powered by the care poor centers. So shout out to Capital Capital Mischief free to care poor. Uh they actually uh, we actually have employers that donate laptops to us and we give wait for free to people that wanted to
roll into books. She actually got a lap to us, So that's that power her too loud to us actually, so if you all want to get loud, test will give away lad talks for free. But I think the public said that can help a lot and do a lot and doing things like that. Yeah, that's great. It's good to know. Um. All right, so I do want to get into some actionable advice in a minute. But before we do that, UM, I would love to just kind of hear what's next for both of you? What
can we expect to see in and beyond? Um, So we'll start with you, Ruben, what's next for career Karma? Yeah, so our big focus right now is just really working with employers on on that product led career guidance that this career management for employees across all levels. So if you are an employer that's here. You're part of an HR team and you are really thinking about internal talent mobility, building out external talent pipelines, about offering UM education benefits,
and thinking about coaching a mentorship. We would love to speak with you. So that's career commam slash Enterprise and then all ways. We're forever going to be focused on serving people. So if you are someone that's looking to break into check right now. Just career COMMA to comp slash apply. We were initially UM expanding into higher education. UM. We are still working with higher education institutions, but really
focused on skills training. So a lot of these educations are are launching these these bookcat formats that are tagabook credentials, so we're not necessarily matching people directly to college. So if you want to get a job in a year or less, come to us. If you want to job in two to four years, don't come to us. I'm Will Lucas and black tag Green Money. Did you know this podcast was nominated for an ACP Image Award, But we are and I need you to support the a
CP has opened up the opportunity for the public. That means you to weigh in and vote on our category, and the opportunity for you to vote ends this Friday, So head over to vote dot ACP Image Awards dot net. Scrolled to the Podcast and Outstanding News and Information Podcast
category and vote for Black Tech Green Need. It's not often that we see a podcast for us by us which highlights the stories of black innovators, technologists, venture capitalists and angel investors, scientists and engineers with this big of a spotlight. So I'm asking for you to take a moment out of your day and vote for Black Tech Green Money. Do it now. Voting closes this Friday. Um and my Um, I guess I would really say that over the next year, I'm gonna be working a lot,
not sleeping. Right now, Wyna is building an open source project. Um. So I told you guys, we work on upskilling and leveling up. So I have a lot of people who come to me that are either already working or they're in career karma right now trying to go through a boot camp. They need to get their skills because they never had a job in tech before, and they their resume is shallow, right, you need that experience on your resume.
So Yna gets you that experience. You come into yn A and like I said, you can be a cruder, you can be somebody. You can be a data engineer. And you want to learn software engineering. So I'll put you on a team, you know, with the developers, and you'll start right then and there learning how to code or learning a new technology that you never learned before. We also have a project management pipeline. I'm building the
DevOps pipeline right now. UM. So everything that you know you can see yourself doing, you can come to yn A and make happen. So our plan is to launch our first m v P for our project next summer. Um. Right now, I think we started for October Fest. So it was a month long of October hacking. UM, stuff getting broken, Uh, people messaging me at night like you know, you'll see, I need you to come fix this issue. Um, I'm waking up in the middle of the night. But
I love those things. I love those things and I love them a lot. And I think from what I'm doing with wy and A and then so I didn't tell you guys. I also manage a store. Um so I print and design clothes in Stockton, California, and my company is called ship tech Prints. You can learn more about us or ship tech prints dot com. And right now, my priority is to amplify Oakland. I want to get you know, all of my babies out the streets. I want to get them involved in tech. I want to
get them jobs. I want to teach them entrepreneurship, teach them how to run their own company. So from now until y'all next time, y'all see me, That's what I'm gonna be working on. All right, well, I'm inspired. I can't wait to see what you both do um in the next year and beyond. So let's talk about some calls to action here for people who are looking to rescale, up skill, maybe leading changes within their organizations around education. Um So, first question, UM, we'll start with you, Ruben.
What are the top three skills? Um it, you would recommend reskilling or upscaling and t ging a competitive edge attack. Yeah. So, I don't know how many people listen to Nevoll, but Neval has a great podcast and he has a really good uh thing called how to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky? Um. And he says, if you want to learn two things, So if you learn how to code and you learn how to sell. You're unstoppable. So I think the quickest way to break in the attack if you want to
be technical is learn how to code. And if you learn how to sell, you'll never go hungry. That's the first two things, UM. But the last one that I just said, UM, is tied to both of the other ones. UM. The third skill that I think everybody should master is communication. Communication is not just verbal communications, not just written communication is how to speak emotion emohi meme gift, especially in
the remote work worle like. One of the biggest things that I'm still learning as a leader is the value of communication. And UM. As an engineer, if you want to get promoted, you you're not gonna get promoted from just being a great colder. It's going to be your communication skills, the way that you manage, the way that you you organized projects. So really mastering communications is the third thing that I would say. It is key for everybody.
That's great, Thank you, Sydney. Anything to add to that, UM, yeah, I would say that I have some skills that I want you to learn, UM, that I feel are very marketable right now. And like I said, considering that company, the company right state to state, we got layoffs and it's my my people getting laid off, you know. Um, And I feel like, not only do these skills help you, but my number one is always entrepreneurship and building your
own brand. Right, Like, just imagine as a collective if people started forming squads and forming groups, you know, and they started coming together, building their own companies, hiring their people, hiring their friends, hiring their family, and we don't have to worry about people getting laid off, you know, and doing certain things. So my number one besides like leveling up yourself and building your own personal brand, stay and
what's hot in the market. Right three things that's hot in the market right now is cloud data science and Python and DevOps, which a lot of people don't know that DevOps is becoming very very very popular right now, Um, just because of how much DevOps has changed things. Right, Like, I've worked on projects where we didn't have any type of DevOps tools in place, and there were certain things that took hours to do, you know, took hours to figure out, and it's simple. That's adding a DevOps tool
in there. You can automate something in the in minutes in seconds, right, So to the crowd. I would tell you guys to go learn about the cloud, Go get certified in the cloud. Um also get skilled you know in data science AI. Python is taken over right now, and then the devlops will be the takeaway. One other thing related to this is I remember when you first
drained UM and we're talking about personal brand. A lot of people were very shy about social media and putting themselves out there, and they were just focused on resume. They didn't have LinkedIn profiles, they didn't have Twitters, and we will say, um, you know, if your resume is essentially what pops up when people google your name, right, And so if you don't tell your own story, other
people are gonna touch joys about you. A lot of people talk about how every company is a media company, every every VC is a media company, but every person is a media company. So you need to tell your own story, right, And this is this is really important because people program computers and media programs people, right, and so you need to take control of your own narrative if you want to really um stand out in this
world in my opinion. Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about kind of the mental barrier component here. So you know, for people who do want to put themselves out there, they want to rescale, upscale, UM, but they're doubting themselves or questioning the timing. What's your advice to people to overcome that mental hurdle? UM. So, I think, first of all, the way you frame uh imposter syndrome, which is what a lot of people call this, it matters.
A lot of people have different definitions for imposter syndrome, and my definition for imposter syndrome is when you are fully qualified to do something, but you've convinced yourself that you're not all right. Everybody here is fully qualified to do whatever it is that they want to do, but you're telling yourself that you're not. Something else that we used to talk about is how whatever you feel is weird about you and it's probably your superpower that you
want to double down on. So a lot of the things that you might be embarrassed to share about your upbringing and your story, you need to figure out how to double down in that regard. And when she talks about spreneurship or the project that you might be building while you're going through a skills training program, you're not gonna just the tech industry is interesting because every every company is going into this hiring format where credentials don't
tell you if you've got to skill. Your degree doesn't tell you if you had a skill, your output does. And a lot of people are going to have a project. We're moving towards project driven resumes. But the best type of projects are aligned with something that's personal to you
in your life. Right, and so you might feel like it's not right to talk about how you were a bartender trying to break into tech, for example, there's no shame in in any role janitor, pick any role waste garbage waste management like build a a project related to that, and then applied to republic services of waste management. And now you're not a fortune year veteran of collecting trash. You're a seasoned logistics waste management expert that happens to
know how to code. It's how you frame it, how you talk to yourself really matters. And and and now you actually have more to bring to the table than the code that's never worked in the industry that you're trying to go to. I would say you need to weigh out your pros and cons and figure out exactly what you want to do. Right. Like I mentioned earlier, you know, we have people you know that get jobs, you know, and stay in one place. They don't feel like they want to level up and get to the
next level. Me personally, I know where I want to go and i know where I'm trying to get. So I'm always trying to do something to help me level up. Your your biggest critic, right, So if you're telling yourself that you can't do it and you're not good enough and you don't know how it's going to turn out, well, it's not gonna turn out right, right, because you're you already putting that in the air. So I always tell people, and I tell people in my group to stay positive.
You know, when we were all going through the job search, it was a horrible time, you know, like we all finished bootcare during the pandemic and everybody was laying people off, which is what's happening right now. This was just two years ago when we were sitting at home, everybody was getting laid off. We were finishing boot camp, trying to get jobs, and this is when the poster syndrome hit hard. Because it's like we didn't did all this work, and now we're here, we got the work to show for it,
and nobody will hire us. So you know what I said, y'all, Let's just keep getting skilled, Let's just keep learning, Let's just keep putting ourselves out there, Let's keep interviewing, Let's keep reaching out to people on LinkedIn, Let's keep meeting up with Ruben, you know, like, let's just keep doing all of these things. Because if we give up on ourselves, then why should anybody in the world take a chance on you. That that's real. Like, if if you don't
believe in yourself, how how can everybody else? But how can anybody else believe in you? The way you taught yourself matters. Like something we used to talk about a lot too, is you might feel like you're not you don't you're not an engineer until you finished the boot camp. But if you decided that you're going to be an engineer today, you are in engineer. Think about it like music,
I play music. So you might not be a greatest artist, but you might be a struggling artist or starving artist, but you're still an artist, right, So whatever you decide to do, that's who you are, And if you don't believe in yourself, the interviewers are going to also see that fear. They're gonna smell that fear. So you have to you have to talk to yourself in a unique way. Because something that Keisha from the Winds, why I used to say, is is words are spells. That's why they
call it spelling. So talk talk right, I love that. UM. All right, this is going to be our last question. So if you are sitting out here today knowing what a unique opportunity it is to be here this week at the largest black tech conference, UM, what is one simple actionable thing that you would do this week to maximize the opportunity the opportunity here at that fro tech UM. I mean something that that's sitting really emphasis aalized this the value of networking UM. And I would also say
the value of serendipity or a randomness. UM. I think once you have intention and you and you know where you're going, I mean you believe in yourself, a lot of magical things happen if as as you go go around here. So I would encourage you to have conversations with people, yes, with intention, but really just to understand people's stories and so that you can help them with
no expectation into a return. A lot of times people talk about the emotional bank account and like putting deposits into people's emotional bank account so they can make a withdrawal without a deficit. I think there's value to that, but I actually don't think you should fully think about it late that because when Sidney talked about that boomerang effect and just that good career comma that you're putting
out into the into the ecosystem. When you do that, the world is gonna gonna you'll never go home because people are gonna look out for you. So if you haven't taked to somebody random, I would encourage you to speak to at least five people today just to get to know them and see how you can help them in some kind of way without any expectation to return, and I promise you'll pay off. It's a lot of
people here, right, It's a lot of people here. You're sitting next to somebody, is somebody behind you, in front of you, and on you know, the right side of you. I think the biggest takeaway that you guys can do is form a group, form a squad, form a community like or come joining. Ain't it community? It's all up to you, you know, But these communities are very important. I think I heard you say something about e r
G AT companies and how important those are. I don't know if your company has the r g s, but mind does. And ever since I became I'm a leader in the e r G at my company, it has made me love work so much more because not only you know, am I just going to work to do my project. I know that I have other people and other events to put on, you know, happy hours that I'm you know, helping put on, and other events in the office that brings people together. So you need people.
Nobody can do it alone. Nobody can do it alone. Nobody can do it alone. Everybody needs somebody. So with all these people here, if you leave here without getting nobody's number or joining the squad or creating your own community, sleep fast. And if your company doesn't have an arg an Employee resource group, start one. I think that's that's very very important because community is gonna get you everywhere. Um, if you're going to multiple schools, multiple companies in lifetime,
we say networks, not credentials. Move careers, so make sure you get part of the network Black Tech Green Money to production of black of the Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast Networking I Hired Media. It's produced by Morgan in the Bonding Me with Lucas with addition to productive support by Saying Argony Rose mcluca us special thank you to Michael David Something that's a surrounto learn more about my guests, other tech disruptus and innovators at afro
tech dot com. Enjoying Black Tech Green Money, Share with somebody go get your money, peace and love. I'm Will Lucas and Black Tech Green Money. Did you know this podcast was nominated for an double a CP Image Award. Where we are and I need your support. The a CP has opened up the opportunity for the public. That means you to weigh in and vote on our category, and the opportunity for you to vote ends this Friday, so head over to vote dot ub a CP Image
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