Educate and Advocate: Certifications and Community Responsibility as a Joy with Jason Belk (1/2)

How could the skills learned as a video game tester be applied to different roles in technology? Understanding and documenting the steps needed to reproduce an error in a video game aren’t so different from understanding the steps to perform a specific task like removing malware from a laptop or replacing a hard drive. Jason Belk, our gest this week in episode 283, has consistently utilized the skill of building checklists over the course of his career, using them to develop and deliver instructional technology courses and to prepare for presentations at a conference.

In this discussion you’ll hear how Jason’s internship at Electronic Arts shaped what he wants from an employer, the experience he gained working in IT Student Services, how he landed a job at Cisco, and why he wanted to become a network engineer. Jason will give us advice on how to choose a technical certification and how we can each play a part to build talent in the tech industry.

Original Recording Date: 06-28-2024

Topics – Meet Jason Belk, Computer Science and Experience as a Video Game Tester, Working in IT Student Services, Learning to Give Presentations, Working on the Cisco on Cisco Team, Pursuing the CCNA, Technical Certifications in a Shifting Industry, Building Talent in Technology

2:23 – Meet Jason Belk

• Jason Belk is a Senior Technical Advocate at Cisco and someone who tries to be a constant learner.
  • In this role, Jason is tasked to be a voice of customers and learners and gives feedback to teams at Cisco who are building platforms and content for training and certifications. Jason also builds content like videos, blogs, and tutorials to get people interested in Cisco’s training and certification offerings.
    • See also Introducing the Tech Advocate Team.
  • Jason is also tasked with community building like you would see in a developer relations role, and this is his second stint in developer relations.
  • “Developer relations is a newer iteration of what people have traditionally seen as a technical marketing engineer type role.” – Jason
    • Jason feels there has been an industry need to step beyond just a technical marketing engineer (or TME) and be more relevant to customers by bringing their perspectives and feedback to product teams. This can be achieved through activities like content creation, community building, ownership and improvement of documentation, and creating a better overall user experience.
  • In the past Jason worked in developer relations for Cisco’s NSO or Network Services Orchestrator.
    • Jason worked under the product manager for NSO at that time and sat in the team meetings. After being charged with improving the user experience, Jason worked with a group of contractors to transform the documentation for NSO to make it more relevant for users. They built a developer center for NSO so that it was geared less toward software engineers and more toward network engineers who needed to use the product.
  • In Jason’s current role working with Cisco learning and certifications, he is no longer focused on one specific product but the entire portfolio.
    • Jason knows he cannot be an expert in everything, but he has experience in network operations and achieved the CCNA earlier in his career also.
    • Jason is working to turn Cisco’s public-facing presence into “an empathetic learning experience for everybody who’s either already in a Cisco related career or looking to get into it.”

6:54 – Computer Science and Experience as a Video Game Tester

• Jason studied compute