Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of CJ and the Duke. As always, I am a co-host Robert the Duke Fedor. And I am Corey, CJ Wesley. This episode is brought to you by Clear Sky. Clear Sky is the only identity governance and security solution built natively on ServiceNow. It optimizes enterprise identity and risk management with a platform first approach. Look, we have built a great digital world where we can plug and play people into our applications and information globally.
Great for speedy operations, but can be a real nightmare for risk and security and governance who are left asking who has access to what? Who authorized that? Should they still have it? When's the last time we checked? This is why CJ and the Duke love Clear Sky, all of the benefit of a company with decades worth of I L M and I g A experience with a solution that's built natively on ServiceNow, the platform that we all trust, clear sky optimized identity management built natively on ServiceNow.
Check the description below for an episode, CJ and I did on Clear Sky as well as how to contact them. Man. I love that new intro. God, you can't get enough of it.
Dude, like seriously, one of our best investments.
All right. What are we talking about today, man?
All right, today, duke, we're gonna talk about the pre bootcamp. What do you need to know before you get to the bootcamp and to make your experience and make sure you get the best out? Get the most out.
Yeah, , is it the right thing for you? And, give you a certain, , a certain level of pre-knowledge so that some of the new, concepts don't completely, , take you off guard, let's say.
Yeah, absolutely everything that you're gonna do in the bootcamp has like its basis and some skills that you should bring with you. And so you should know what those skills are before you get there, so you can make sure you have them so that you can keep up, right? I know boot, bootcamp is a school, right? It's a class. And when you get in there, right, at least it's gonna move at a certain pace. That pace will hopefully be, , fast enough and slow enough, right?
So that you can keep up, but that you also being challenged. But the key to knowing whether or not it's fast enough or slow enough for you specifically, is knowing what skills you need to bring to the table before you get.
That's right. And what kind of stuff you're gonna be learning. And I think there's a great segue into 0.1 is do you have to be technical in order to take a ServiceNow bootcamp?
Yeah, that's a good question, duke. I say you have to have some measure of technical of being technical, right? Like technical knowledge. I, that doesn't mean that you have to know how to code. That doesn't mean that you have to have done like enterprise IT before or even help desk, right? But I do think it means you have to understand a little bit about technology, before you get to the bootcamp. and you and all of this stuff is freely available. Online, there are a lot of classes out there.
of course it's YouTube videos, boom, YouTube videos. There are a ton of YouTube videos, and I guess TikTok now, I don't know, for you kids, right? you know, there's a ton of videos and stuff on videos on those mediums, right? That'll get you caught up on some of the intro and the basics and stuff. Do yourself a favor and find that stuff get read up on it , and we'll talk a little bit about what those specific, videos look like or those skills look like so you know what to search for.
But I do think there is a measure of being technical that's required before you enter a class that's designed to teach you to be technical.
I, I am emphatically. yes, there is going to be a lot of technical stuff now. I think too many people will disqualify themselves at that point thinking I'm not a technical person now. It's not like you are figuring out what every pin on a motherboard does. Not that kind of technical,
right.
but a, mindset that is disciplined around engineering. Thought, How does this work? What are the components that is made out of? How does it go? You have to be technical in that sense, and if you see you blow up no matter what position you choose. Some are more technical than others, but at the end of the day, you are creating solution for. Either the company that employs you, or a company that hires the company that employs you,
Right.
And if you're building a solution, there's just no way around the fact that all solutions are somewhat technical. They are composed of other pieces and how well those pieces together could come together. Is how well the solution, succeeds. So yes, you do have to be technical. We'll get into the details on what things you have to be technical on, but a, yes, you do have to be technical. B, don't let that scare you. Just be prepared for it.
Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. Don't let that scare you. Just be prepared for it, right? Because you are seeking to learn how to use a technological platform to do work for folks, so, yeah. Think it's disingenuous to approach it thinking that there's no technical that you won't have to learn, right? Like you will have to be technical at, at some point , you know, the evolution of your skillset will go that way. absolutely. What else you got, duke? Uh, let's see.
Point number two on this one is know what ServiceNow is used for. What do you think about that?
Well, we did a whole episode on it. It's called Work Is bs. We will have have a link in the description below. Everybody take a shot.
No doubt.
I find that it's really difficult for people to describe the value that they've, that they can do and the types of things they can do on the platform unless they really have a firm. I'm talking like you feel it in your guts understanding of what it is ServiceNow does. And if you just take that question and meditate on it, what is ServiceNow? And you're not finding a good answer, like, oh, it's kind of an ITT SM and efficiency and da da da da. No. go back, listen to our work is BS program.
and we'll just, we'll give you the bullet points here. Work is bull crap. We all love our jobs, most of us. but there's stuff about work. , all of the. organization of work is really what sucks. So how do you know what stuff you have to do, You always have more stuff to do than time to do it in. So which is the most important? That's work prioritization. Is that piece of work part of a series of other jobs for one overarching task. So how is the work sequenced?
Is this more important than that prioritization? I'm just a wheel in the cog of a bigger machine. So how does work? And these are all problems we have, in doing work without systems like ServiceNow. And so system ServiceNow is a system to make work more visible, more governed, more automated, more integrated.
So absolutely Duke, I think. Work is BS man. Like, first of all, I love that rant, it never gets old. but you're absolutely right. it's all for me, it's all about, , knowing how you wanna create the efficiencies around, process management, around work management. Really. It's like you, when you're walking through any kind of process and everything's a process, right? We don't think about. You know, our daily lives that way.
often, and we definitely don't think about jobs that way in terms of like, you know, what's the process? But most things that you do are a process. And so, when you start to break it down , and figure out, okay, like step one, step two, step three, step four steps, step five, like ServiceNow maps directly to that, you know, and the optimization of it. What does that all mean?
first of all, you should re, you should go and, um, do the intro to ServiceNow course over at now Learning, that's the first place to start. That's gonna get you, um, get you caught up on how to actually utilize the platform. Like what ServiceNow does and how it does it, right? Like, you know, where to click, how to click, you know, the whole gonna give you some good fundamentals on what the platform's designed to do, right? You know?
and listen to our episode. Seriously. This is like the fifth time I've said it, but you've gotta feel this in your guts. And I think if you listen to that episode, you will feel it in your guts every job you've ever had. My first job was pedaling an ice cream bicycle. that or shampoo carpets, I can't remember at this point. Anyways. It wasn't the work that was the problem. It was just like all the craziness around managing that work and there's tons of it.
So everybody's felt, everybody has felt. What ServiceNow is for now, learn how to articulate it. So if you, if you know that going into one of these boot camps, , beyond just like, oh, ServiceNow sounds like a great gig, it is , but you'll have a way easier time if you fundamentally know in your heart what ServiceNow is for. Then you can, like on a, under a microscope, you can zoom in and figure out what types of work within the ecosystem are of real.
Yeah. Yeah. Like that, all of that, right? And all of that stuff is, is what you're gonna build on when you start building your service down career, right? Because you're gonna see that stuff. Client's gonna come to you and say, Hey, we need a service down person gonna do X, Y, and Z. Right? That X, Y, and Z is gonna be some of this stuff we just talked about. Right. And so you're gonna have to figure out how to map, the, that knowledge against the client's desire and deliver value, right?
That's why internalizing it, like Duke said, in your gut, right, like is a super important thing, right? Because then it allows you to talk about it with, , with some degree of ex of expertise.
Okay. item number three. and this is kind of like the first of technical concepts you're gonna have to come to grips with and just understand like as fast as you can read the English language, that's how well you have to understand this concept, and that is databases, especially relational databases.
Yeah.
And I think if you're not, if you're not coming from it, or application design, maybe the idea of a database is like a little bit scary or confusing. So we're gonna break it down really, really, really fast. So imagine, Corey, imagine, imagine we'd like started up a help desk, right?
Okay.
we got like zero tools, like maybe we got Excel. So what would be the first thing we'd do? We go into Excel and we'd make out all the columns, right? And there's like first name, last name, phone number, what the problem is, what building they're in. the category of the problem. Et except everything we care about, about a ticket. We'll just write it in Excel. Can we all agree that you know, what we do?
yes, as long as you'll allow me to say how much I hate Excel
Okay, but pick any other tool, any digital tool, right? You're just gonna write down a bunch of stuff. Okay? Now, everything that, what you've essentially done is you've created a table, right? You have a sheet, and you've got columns across the top. Those are all the things we care about. And that's, the columns in the table or
Right.
fields, columns, properties. You'll hear those terms all the time.
Yep.
And, but what's the real problem with that, Corey? if you have a table, you can store everything in it. What's the first problem that comes up?
Oh, first problem I always think about, you got too much there, right? Like it's really hard to,
in terms of scrolling? Yeah.
yeah. Like you get too many records there, right? Like, and the more horizon width you get in the table, right? Like the harder it is at that point to form any relationships between the data that you have, right?
so I'll say what I hate is the fact that our friend Alice, Alice Gianopoulos from 22 Rei Goose Road calls, and he calls once every couple days.
All right.
Is anybody else like sweating about the fact that you're typing in Aand Gianopoulos from 22 Resti Road? Like how do you even spell Resti Gush? And how are you gonna rely on 10 people on the help desk to spell that consistently, every single time?
Ah, I follow you.
You see what I mean? It,
I do. Yeah.
it's like a con, like God bless the dude, right? Love his name. Sounds fun. Really fun. Not fun to spell.
Right,
And are we gonna take the extra minute every time we're gonna ask this dude our favorite customer every single time? How do you spell your name?
right.
And so anyways, so what you do is you create a separate Excel sheet and you say, let's put a place for all of our users and we'll track first name, last name, location, phone number, and then that way on our main sheet when we're just taking help desk tickets. All I have to say is get me customer one, aand Gianopoulos, and I don't have to worry about the spelling. All I've said is customer one, please. So that's what we call a relational database.
Now, because the incident table or a ticketing table relates to some other table, when I want a user, I go to the user. When I want a location, I go to the location table. When I go to the company table, and then each of these tables can store only the stuff we care about, that thing and the table.
Yeah. See, that's what I meant when I said like, you know, two minutes, like the, uh, the one sheet iss, uh, way too, way too large horizontally, right? Like if you're trying to store users and companies and locations and incidents all in one table, right? Like technically you can do that. Yeah, it's nasty looking, right? But like technically you do, you just keep, you just keep adding an infinite number of fields. But how the heck do you use that? Like you can't fundamentally, right?
So that, and that's where the relation relational database comes in, right? Like if you have those, those extra tables, um, then you can refer to those, right? And so when you, the first thing you, you notice when going into service now, like if you're opening an incident, incident, right? There is a field there for user. It's a reference feel, right? That means it references, it references another table, right? And it references the user table.
And so then you pull up a, uh, a view of the users there, and you go ahead and click on that and brings you in and it brings the user there. Now you wanna reference a location and you wanna reference, you know, so on and so forth, right? So that's the, that, that is the beauty of, of. Of the relational, uh, data do, which I, I totally agree with you. You can keep these different tables with validated data in separate places. Right?
And you can maintain them in separate places, but you can also reuse them in separate places too.
Yep. And zero human error on it on form. , right? Every, everything is stored where it needs to be stored, everything is maintained where it needs to be TA maintained. We can probably do a whole episode on just the miracle. It really is a miracle, right? Like , relational databases are a miracle, , in terms of organizing the data. but you do have to know this because ServiceNow is a relational database, and when you build your solutions, you're going to have to understand like the impact of.
Like so many times I've had to correct people going through the cohorts cuz they're building whole other user tables. They're building whole other location tables. I'm like, why are you building another one of these? Well, this solution needs one too. Well, you've got one of them. That's the miracle of it. You use that one,
Right.
right? so that's one of the technical things you'll have to know. I think you should know pre bootcamp.
Yeah,
else? We gotta.
Well, you shouldn't, you should know the types of service down jobs Duke, right? Like, you know, what are you likely to be able, what are you likely to come out of a bootcamp doing right? From an admin to developer, so on and so forth.
yeah, It surprises me how not known this is like the, I get a lot of questions on just this. I mean, we did three episodes on the different types of work, right? We did. We did admin, we did ba, we did Architect. That was our first episode. , CJ: there's a ton, it's not just, you know, admin, or developer. An architect, right? Like those are kinda like fundamentals. Like, or maybe, so to a certain extent I classify those as almost experience levels to a certain degree Yeah, I could.
I mean there's definitely, there's some element of that, I get
like a hard mapping. Right. But it, you know, it, to a certain degree, right? Like you do need a little bit more experience to be an architect than you do to be an admin. Right. But there is a Yeah, but I can definitely see a direct path from admin to architect and skipping dev Because an admin, you know, in, in a lot of ways, we'll know a lot about the platform and, and can know a lot about the platform without building code on it.
And then, then there's just the way the market overlaps these thingss anyway, like there's so many admin slash devs,
Yeah.
there's so many. one man bands, one woman bands in the ServiceNow world.
Yeah, especially customer side, right? I get to fill in that, you know, the ServiceNow job market is still, optimized for the one person gig, right? Like, I, I own the instance, I'm the only ServiceNow person at my job. there are 25,000 people using it and, and, and I do everything right. but, a bit of a sidetrack there. But I mean, if, When I think about types of service down jobs as a whole, right? I think about our niches episode, right? some of those things were.
Once you come out of a bootcamp and once you're skilled up, what are you gonna do in a ServiceNow ecosystem? Are you gonna be a developer? An architect? That's one thing. Like that whole set of, you know, skills is one thing, but are you going into like asset management or C M D B, or it T B M or whatever the, name of it is this month. Or are you gonna go to go on to something like, I Tom, right?
Like in, if you've got like it bonafide that you can mix in with your now new ServiceNow, expertise, so and so see, things like that, right? That's what I think about when I think about like the type of ServiceNow jobs out there. are these niches that you can slide yourself into
Oh man. I think it's really important that we drag that dead horse out to swing a couple more times out Cause I think one thing that newcomers have completely undue pressure, irrational amounts of pressure is go pick a niche in ServiceNow. And I'm like, how on earth are you gonna pick a niche in service now when you don't even have, you're at the point where you're gonna start a boot. And you can be like a couple weeks in, maybe not even in, and somebody's telling you, you gotta pick a niche.
Like no, you don't like, what you have to do is learn the fundamentals.
Yes.
All of the veteran niched players in the ServiceNow market had something else when they got to the fundamentals or they adopted something once the fundamentals was. Right. I'm sure there were people who were like pristine SecOps people before they even saw ServiceNow. Right. But they had something beforehand. They had a ServiceNow process niche before they had the technical shops on ServiceNow. Right.
But then a lot of us, me, , you know, I, I was doing plain old admin stuff, plain old dev stuff until somebody basical. borderline forced me to look into I TBM and spm. But there's there, I don't think there's a path where it's like, I don't have the ServiceNow fundamentals and I don't have a process niche preexisting where you can walk in and say, this is my niche. I don't know how you could do it.
Yeah, I mean, it's a really good point, duke. and I think this is kind of a, a, a, a part in the, in the, in the, , episode where there is, I want to acknowledge a little bit of a split here because, they're the folks who are gonna come to. bootcamp, and not doing ServiceNow, who will have some technology experience, right? Who will have, some process experience, right? Real world processes for whatever that process might be, right? Like it's, like we said, it's a lot of them out there.
and then there are gonna be some folks who are approaching this from the standpoint of. Not having done anything that could directly be related to a ServiceNow niche in their past. Right. And so, like you said, if you're in that ladder group and you've never done anything that you can see, , obviously relates to a ServiceNow niche, right? How you create a niche in a, in a bootcamp, right? Or in your first or second ServiceNow class, right? Like, that's impossible, right? don't even try.
Like, you just need to be learning the fundamentals of the platform, like Duke said, right? Like, just learn how ServiceNow works. Get your skill up, and how ServiceNow works. And then you'll find the parts of it, through experience that kind of you gravitate towards and then you double down. Right.
Like once you figure out, oh man, I really freaking love asset management, then you double down there and then you start figuring out like some industry specific asset management training or understanding and marry that with your ServiceNow, you know, skills, right? And now you are industry leading asset management resource, right? And that, and that changes the way the market looks at you.
I'm gonna, I'm gonna go ahead and disagree a little bit.
Oh yeah. Conflict. Woo
almost 80 episodes. This is the first time,
Yeah, right.
I, I think you gotta be comfortable with not being industry leading anything
All right.
for this part of your career,
Yeah.
asset management is a business discipline , like, you go back to Egypt, ? While they're building the pyramids and talk about assets and they will understand you
Fair enough.
Um, and it, it's, it's a, it's a hard discipline of its own meaning, like either by school or by, life work experience. People become asset managers, but I don't think people become asset managers by reading something or like studying the ServiceNow tool. And now I understand how asset management works. No. You've seen what ServiceNow's interpretation is on some of the asset management process, but you haven't managed assets for an.
Right.
And so like, I, I don't say that to discourage, like don't go into the platform and don't aspire to be, IT Asset manager, no, do Aspire, but realize that there's gonna be a whole separate learning path on that. Like Lawrence Tindell from Glide Fast do just published a whole book, like a whole ass book, on on it. Asset management and you know, dudes got courseware all over the place. Like It's a whole other discipline of learning. Did I mischaracterize your position? Sorry.
No, you're good, man. I, I, my, my point there, was that, I, I think at a certain point you will, uh, Start to feel a, a, a bit of the platform more strongly than others, right? Yeah. And at that point, that's when you wanna double down on some additional learning. in that process that exists outside of ServiceNow, now you wanna double down on your ServiceNow learning on the plat on the, , process too, right?
Cause you wanna know how to implement it inside the platform, but, these are to your point, and I think this is the part that I skipped past, but these are bus verifiable and bonafide business processes with a whole body of work and knowledge that exists, around them outside of the service Now ecosystem, right? Like if you want to become leading. In that area, in the ServiceNow ecosystem, you have to understand how it works from a business perspective also outside of the ServiceNow ecosystem.
So you can bring , those qualities to your, um, to your engagements with your clients.
Yep. I would learn it outside of ServiceNow. it's so, so important. . Um, I think maybe we didn't have this on the, on the, on the board, but, Maybe we can talk a little bit about how people integrate their past lives to an to an advantage.
Ooh. Yeah, that's a good one. all right, so I, I'll kick You wanna kick that one off or you want
Sure. I'll take this one.
Yeah, go for
especially in the context of next gens, cuz next gens are, is it not people who already have like significant life experience is if is NextGen for everybody or is it for people who are doing work changes?
Not entirely sure.
Okay. Near, near my, so for those people who are maybe have already had a career, And they're switching, they're switching careers. I get a lot of, when I talk to them, I hear a lot of like, it's an, it's anxiety because I came from another world and I don't know this world. That's true. Okay. But that gives you a unique advantage over maybe other people who haven't because you've seen a lot of how life works.
Like work life works that somebody with not as much work experience would not have experienced right now. So like when we talk about how, the whole work is BS thing, , and all the things about organizing work and how frustrating and, damaging that can be. Like, you've al you already get that. So you have the ca the ability of integrating that into your ServiceNow learning from a, from a place of guts, from a place of lived experience. You can understand why these solutions need to exist.
absolutely. And you know, duke, there isn't enough talk about bringing your past with you to your future, there's a lot of thought on this that you're going to learn something that's gonna make you better, as if what you brought to the table wasn't good enough. and I just don't think that that's true. Um, I think, all skills, you know, help you over the course of your life. I mean, I, there's a lot that I've learned, from even before I was working, right?
Like I, my first job was at, um, Popeye's Chicken, right when I was 16. And there's a lot that I learned there that I still bring to like client engagements. and you somebody say, oh, what do you mean by that? I mean, you're working at Popeye's Chicken, like you, your first job is customer service, And everybody you speak to there, has a request, a task for you to a certain degree, right? Like, and you gotta execute it. And how do you execute tasks, you go through a process, right?
Like all, you know what I mean? Like
like, how many McDonald's out there are run by like four people? Like there's four people run that whole thing's like just carloads, after carloads, after carloads of people every minute, and it's just like four people just like blah. And it's just like they got the process down.
dude, I ran a Popeyes with two people, right? Like I wasn't running it right, like I, I, I was on the back end, but it was me and a manager and We ran that store with two people until help. you know what I mean? And it's because we both knew the processes really well, and we both were really good at the job, right? And we both, you know, focused on execution. And we both, we're focused on customer service and, you know, we did all of those things.
And so all, what my point to all of that is, right, like you could take all of that stuff and map that directly to your next thing in life, right? Because it's still valuable, right? Don't throw it away. because you, you went through that experience, that experience was hard earned, don't throw it away. Like take it and figure out how you wanna map that to your next thing and then do that,
I would say at the very least what you bring is knowledge of a work paradigm that somebody else hasn't experienced, and therefore you have all kinds of inspiration fuel for stuff you can build on ServiceNow to up your skill. That's another episode. We did a whole episode on that link in the description below, but shoot, man. Again, my first, job. I can't, I, honest to God, I can't remember if it was shampoo carpets or riding the ice cream bike. But let's take the ice cream bike episode.
, what on earth can service that? Teach me about ServiceNow. Build an app for managing a ice cream bike franchise. and just think about that. How many bikes do you own? How much do they cost? Can you depreciate them? When was the last time they were. That's just the bikes. Okay? Now you've got a central hub with all your ice cream inventory in it, right? How much inventory do you actually have in it? And every bike for every route, every single day will take inventory out of that hub inventory.
So every day you've gotta recheck that inventory, and every day you've gotta check the sales performance of the bike against that inventory, right? Because they may have taken out a hundred units of ice cream, but somehow it's only come back with 95 units of payment.
Right.
And so, and then there's the cash floats. Did the p, did the bikers come back with as much or less cash float for making change and such as they did beforehand? And then you have routes, like some of those routes are more profitable than others. And so how are you gonna distribute those routes evenly amongst your riders? What happens if one of your get sick? It's insane the amount of app. build inspiration.
You can just get out of something, out of knowing how something works that nobody else knows.
Right.
Have you ever been a guitar tech at a concert like ? I haven't, but I'd love to figure out how that works.
No, seriously. Right.
Have you ever been a, like a hair stylist, a beautician? Have you ever been like a, like somebody on a construction site? Like I don't, there's just.
Man, I, you know , what I have been Duke is I, I helped run a conference once before, it was like a knowledge conference, but not like for ServiceNow or an IT or anything or anything like that. But I was, I was, um, coordinating IT operations for a, global, Conference for the, um, logistics portion, of, uh, um, distributor who was there. And they were, um, they were responsible for a lot of the inbound product and making sure it gets distributed to all of the booths.
And so that you know, that their clients had the things that they needed in order to like spin up their expo. . Right. And, and actually, you know, talk to their customers and demonstrating all that kind of stuff. And I was helping them coordinate the logistics and it portion of it. Right. And that was cool. Right. , when, when I think about that, it's like that is a skill set that, that is weird, really weird. And, and a job that's really odd to have.
People have run like a professional conference like that, or had any kind of involvement at, from like a massive scale like that. from literally, tracking packages from the time that they're shipped to when they get to the loading dock here and making sure that trades know that they're here and they move the things, all that right, like the whole process again. Right?
Like no matter where you look, right, you can find, aspects where ServiceNow would've helped you in the past and how to relate your past experience to ServiceNow in the future.
Yeah, at, at minimum it gives you that it may give you other social advantages too. Like there's one example I keep giving about, a woman I talked to, who was a phlebotomist and she was talking about, how that could work to her advantage. And I'm like, imagine what a phlebotomist has to experience every day in terms of like interpersonal relationships.
Mm-hmm.
hi, I got five seconds to establish a rapport with you because I'm gonna shove this sharp metal object into your arm You know, and drop blood out of it. , like that's what they have to do and they have to establish a rapport and trust and get you to not freak out. And they have to do it in seconds. And it's like we have really tough stakeholders.
Right. Right. It's like, yeah, okay, completely different. Definition of tough
Yeah. one time at a, at a company I worked for, they. Like expec forces guy who came in to be like an i l problem and, uh, incident manager. And they're literally telling this guy like, are you sure you're ready for our stakeholders? Like, are you sure? Ready for our , our ferocious stakeholders? he's like, yeah, I'm jumping outta planes 800 feet and walking into villages where I don't speak the language. Hoping to find friends I, I'll be okay.
Right. Like, yeah, no, I, I got this
So I think that one more thing you can bring with you is a mindset that even though. You are going into something new. Maybe it's got all kinds of richer financial reward for you, but don't discount where you came from, no matter where you came from.
Yes.
And that's in terms of work, hobby, social, whatever. All of those things will inform your imagination about ways you can apply ServiceNow, and that will fundamentally change how well you're able to learn ServiceNow. I think that's all I got.
Yeah, man, I think, I think we wrapped it up, duke. I think that's the end. I think that's the end.
79 episodes. Still no outro All right, cool.