What do you want to be when you grow up?

As many of you know, Sage has forged a partnership with Morehouse College in Atlanta.  The aim is to build up our early careers program in Atlanta and promote diversity while making a positive impact in the community.  That emerging partnership led to hosting an event on campus last Wednesday, April 10th.  Sage Day was planned to provide students with insights about Sage as well as the type of roles available in a company like ours.  It was also intended to provide further insights into some of the technologies we work in such as the Cloud and AI.  Hats off to Fiona Yipp, Vicky Rowland, and Sophia Adhami for putting this event together.  I think it was as much fun and insightful for those of us from Sage who participated as it was for the students.

The event itself had several sections including a nice dinner the night before which enabled us to get acquainted with our counterparts at the college.  I got to sit next to Vicky and Renee Jordan who coordinates events like this one at Morehouse.  She is also quite the artist and shared with me a lot of her works.  Amazing stuff.

I even discovered that Chad Livengood isn’t the only Chicago Bear’s fan – Tracy Owens in Sage’s Public Affairs function lent me his hat to serve as evidence that there are 2!  It was a really nice dinner that helped set the stage for a great day on campus with the students.

The next day we met on campus – which brought back some great memories.  A sort of Fireside chat was arranged with Aaron Harris and I responding to questions that were mostly prearranged.  These questions were asked by 4 of our graduates including our one and only Matthew Limyadi.  More on him later.  We were asked questions about our career journeys – including how they were influenced by events in our youth.  They asked about challenges we faced and how they impacted our career direction and what advice we might have for students just getting started. 

The students also asked really good questions about technology and even job security.  They were all so cordial and always stood when asking the question.  That was Donavan who was really delightful.

There was another great section that followed where 4 Sage colleagues who were recent graduates presented a “day in the life” presentations. Two of these colleagues were in HR, one in Marketing and another in Cloud Operations.  Matthew Limyadi represented us very well and did a great job!  That is him on the far right.

The early afternoon session provided the students with an opportunity to practice interviewing and learn how to write a compelling resume/cv and the evening was capped off with a really cool hands on event led by Brantley Edwards and Fizza Aslam – one of our TAMs from AWS.  While it helped to feed them throughout the day, the students were so engaging and really really sharp!

It was a great event and gave me great confidence in our youth.  There are many challenges we face as workers, families, citizens, etc… and I came away feeling as though we are in good hands.

As much as I enjoyed the 2 days with Sage colleagues and Morehouse leaders and students, the thought process leading up to the event and the reflections that followed were invigorating. 

I remembered back to my youth and thought about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  We didn’t have computer games or social media, so we spent a lot of time outdoors riding around the neighborhood until we were either called in for dinner or for the night. 

I was a pretty hands-on guy with a lot of curiosity.  I wanted to understand how things worked and would often take them apart to figure that out – often to the displeasure of my father.  I didn’t always find a place for every part when I tried to reassemble it.  The lawn mower, TV, my bicycle were just a few of the things I disassembled.  We played with toys like Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, and Legos – I’m sure you’ve heard of those!

As far as a career goes, my first interest was in food – big surprise!  I wanted to be a chef and started working in restaurants as a dishwasher, a bus boy, and eventually a fry chef or broiler chef.  As much as I enjoyed the craft, I didn’t like that it required an entirely different time commitment – nights, weekends, and holidays.  I rarely was able to spend time with family and friends.

I kind of returned to my curiosity for how things worked and it was further fueled by my Uncle Ronnie.  He contracted Polio in the Korean War and was relegated to a wheelchair.  Polio causes paralysis and attacks your respiratory system.  Before the war he was a carpenter and afterwards I became his hands and legs in the many projects he embarked upon.  He made doll houses and all kinds of different wooden toys.  He was very innovative and singlehandedly adapted his car so that he could drive – installing levers and such to operate the brakes and gas pedals.  He required a highly specialize bed to account for his compromised lungs and had me and a neighbor help make a portable version of it.  We ended up in an article in a local newspaper highlighting that effort.

He was a great inspiration to me.  He didn’t look at his disability as something that held him back, but rather a positive thing.  It taught him patience and perseverance.  It taught him the importance of teamwork and mentoring.  He tried to instill those traits in me and had a belief in my potential that I still lean on to this day.

Fast forward and I entered into a Mechanical Engineering program at the University of Wisconsin Platteville.  In my second year I took an elective computer class where we would write software through punch cards and I was pretty quickly hooked.  I transferred to another school with a computer major and graduated there with a business degree majoring in Management and Computer Systems.  It was a pretty pioneering programming back in the 1980s.  Here is a picture of me on graduation day in Dec of 1987.

I would spend the next 25 years at Fiserv where the first 10 were developing banking software and would move on to leading a customer service team for awhile and then eventually into “infrastructure”.  While this will show my age, I was involved in many firsts – from WANs to LANS, virtualization, developing the first Fiserv.com website and the first Intranet website.  Bringing in the first PC and the first mobile phone.  I’ve just recently celebrated my 12th year here at Sage and have thoroughly enjoyed this chapter.

Even though I have a lot of miles behind me, I still regularly ask myself “what do I want to be when I grow up?”  I would encourage you to do the same.  I would have never guessed I would have been a software engineer or a leader in a cloud operations team.  I’ve been very fortunate to have been in environments where you can explore different roles.  Sage is clearly one of those places.

What are the things you enjoyed doing when you were in your youth?  Who did you look up to?  How did you land in your current role and why?  Where do you want to go next?

I  would encourage you to get even more involved in our early careers program.  We now have 34 graduates who have started their career journey with us in Cloud Operations.  They have made a tremendous impact not only on Cloud Operations, but on Sage as a company and on us as fellow colleagues.  I promise you that you will get us much of a reward as you put into it.

I also want to let you know your colleagues, and particularly those in the early stages of their careers are watching you.  They are looking to see if the role you are in is one they aspire to have.  They are looking at you to see if you possess the traits they want in their lives.  They are watching how you respond to certain situations so they can be better equipped to do the same when they face them.  They may also be looking for that person who believes in them and genuinely wants them to be successful and happy.  If that sounds like a mentoring opportunity – it is.

For me, my mentoring has taken on a new chapter.  This is me with my grandson – Henry – in his first set of shoes.  He’s just learning to walk.  I am sooo looking forward to helping him navigate his early years – teaching him how to do things and being there when he has questions.   There is a light in his eyes that is infectious, and I see the same light in the eyes of our graduates.

If you haven’t asked yourself in a while, “what do I want to be when I grow up?, maybe you should.  Also, look around and try to recognize those in your circles looking for guidance or nurturing.  You may not see yourself as a mentor, but I promise you that you have much to offer!