Next Level: Shifting Specialties and Broadening Your Outcome Goal with Duncan Epping (2/2)

Are you trying to reach that next level in your career? Why do you want to get to the next level, and what is most important to you in doing that? If next level means next job level in your case, at some point there is no next level. What then?

Duncan Epping would encourage you not to set a goal based on an endpoint. This week in episode 304 we share Duncan’s career progression over time to Chief Technologist, discussing his motivations and goals along the way. You’ll hear about the qualities top level individual contributors in our industry possess. We also talk through the willingness to shift our technical specialty over time and the humility of approaching everything with the intent to learn something regardless of the outcome.

Original Recording Date: 10-29-2024

Duncan Epping is Chief Technologist, a published author, a blogger, and someone who loves to learn. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Duncan, check out Episode 303.

Topics – A Job Role is not the Goal, Reputation and Reliability, Shifting Your Area of Specialization

2:47 – A Job Role is not the Goal

• We’ve discussed not needing to go into management to progress in our careers and continuing to progress as individual contributors with some of our guests. Sometimes this means moving to another company whose clearly defined job leveling supports this choice (staff level, principal level, distinguished level, and perhaps all the way to Chief Technologist). What does it take to progress along this path?
  • Duncan tells us this is something that is quite difficult to discuss because the way someone can progress can differ greatly across companies. Things which may be important for progression at one company may not be important at others.
  • Though Duncan is a Chief Technologist today, repeating the same steps he took does not guarantee someone will reach the same level or end up in the same situation. Some of this has to do with being in the right place at the right time or being properly positioned to reach the next level.
  • “Even for myself, at some point there is no career progression anymore…. There’s not always a next level. The same applies for the CEO of the company. There is no higher level…. That is also something to consider.” – Duncan Epping
  • We might hear of people wanting to get to the next level and then to the next, but at some point, the progression will stop.
  • “You also need to ask yourself, ‘why do you want to get to that next level? What is most important to you?’ …One of the things that was extremely important to me when I started out in the virtualization space…it wasn’t becoming a Chief Technologist or a CTO or anything like that…. The one thing that was really important to me was to learn as much as I possibly could about this new, cool technology that appeared on the market. That is the one thing that I wanted to do. And that is what set me up for success. I wasn’t constantly chasing new job roles. Those job roles were more or less chasing me…which I know sounds very funny, but that’s the way things really went….” – Duncan Epping
  • Several months after Duncan started blogging, both VMware and EMC reached out to him about job openings (because he had written a lot of content). But Duncan did not write the articles to get a new job. He wrote them to learn something about a technology he was passionate about.
  • After starting in professional services at VMware, Duncan consistently tried to stay on top of the latest technical innovations inside the company, expanding his professional network through discussions with product managers and engineering team members. He was asked to move over to the cloud team that did some of the earliest deployments of vCloud Director.
  • Once the VCDX certification was created, Duncan wanted to figure out how to get it. Through the process of obtaining his VCDX, Duncan further expanded his professional network and was asked to become a Technical Marketing Architect.
  • “It was all a more or less natural evolution in terms of my passion and my interests more than me chasing a particular job.” – Duncan Epping
  • In Duncan’s opinion, a principal or a Chief Technologist does not mean you’re the person who has been working at a company the longest. Someone could be a senior engineer for many years while others could progress to higher job levels in a very short time.
  • “It’s also not always the most technical person that gets to the next level. It’s typically that person that knows how to communicate well both internally and externally but on top of that is also extremely interested in learning new things. And that could be anything. I wanted to say learning new technology, but it isn’t necessarily new technology. It could be anything. And I think being able to convey that passion and helping other people moving forward as well…that is what essentially then sets you up for a job role like a Chief Technologist….” – Duncan Epping
  • Being a Chief Technologist isn’t just about understanding technology. Duncan mentions this is about understanding people, processes, customers, and much more.
  • Duncan highlights being a part of mentoring programs in the past as both a mentor and a mentee. In mentoring conversations people often want to know how to get from one point to another or how to replicate what someone else did in a short amount of time. Duncan says when he takes them through the process, they might say they don’t have the time to put in the work.
    • Duncan chose to continue learning over time because it was a part of his job but also because he loves learning about new technology as well. He didn’t think about the process in terms of time he did or didn’t have.
    • Duncan loves writing about and reading about new technology, watching videos about it, and answering questions about it on community forums / Twitter / Facebook / LinkedIn.
    • Duncan feels it is all of the above things combined that present a person as someone who could take on a role of an internal champion and an external facing technologist for a company (a role like Chief Technologist).
• John restates this as the role is more of an outcome of many actions, and the goal was staying curious, continuing to learn, and building a professional network along the way. The recognition and getting new opportunities seem like a byproduct of the underlying curiosity.
  • “A lot of people when they talk about their career progression and then they start thinking about goals, they tend to talk about that endpoint where they want to get. They tend to set that goal and say ‘I want to become a CTO of X, Y, and Z.’” – Duncan Epping, reflecting back on a career progression talk he gave a couple of years ago
  • When Duncan started working for VMware, the role of Chief Technologist did not even exist, so it certainly was not a goal for him. There was one CTO of the company at that time, and that was it.
  • “My goal was always to learn more about the technology that I wanted to learn more about and help other people to understand the technology better. That was what I was working toward.” – Duncan Epping
    • Notice Duncan’s goal was not a sole focus on pay raises or promotions. Those were byproducts of the work he was doing toward a larger goal.
  • People tend to set huge goals and get disappointed when they do not reach them. Duncan mentions even within huge companies, there are a relatively small number of CTO or Chief Technologist roles.
    • In Duncan’s opinion we should not set a goal to land one of these specific roles because the chances of disappointment are quite high when we don’t get one.

12:58 – Reputation and Reliability

• John speaks to his own philosophy of dreaming in bands and not being laser focused on a single job role or company. Think about the types of people you want to work with, the projects you want to work on, and the things you want to learn (i.e. things that can create more opportunities for you in the future – sometimes in the form of a new role).
  • When Duncan became a Chief Technologist, there was no process for becoming one. The process was created internally because people wanted to promote Duncan to that level.
  • “They knew my skill set. They knew I was passionate about something. They didn’t really have a head count for it, but they ended up creating a head count. And they ended up creating that role because they felt there was a need to have someone like myself to be part of that organization.” – Duncan Epping, on getting chosen for a specific role
  • In most cases, Duncan was asked to take certain roles rather than chasing them.
  • “I think that is something that a lot of people don’t tend to understand…. I didn’t wake up on Monday morning and all of a sudden I was a Chief Technologist. I also started out as a consultant at VMware. I was just a consultant, and then I became a senior consultant. And then after a couple of years I became a principal consultant. And then I went from consultancy into technical marketing. And then, within technical marketing I became a principal. And then I moved between different teams…. It all happened organically, and it isn’t something that I planned for. It is just something that occurred over time.” – Duncan Epping, on progressing through different roles within a company
  • There were many things Duncan