 This particular session we're going to be talking about today is specifically how to navigate your IT career in the latter half or the latter third of your environment. But there's absolutely stuff in here for everybody no matter where you're coming from for a different spectrum. But this is something that we haven't had a lot of chance to talk about in depth about things that we've used and approached over this time. So, Orin and I built this content based on a whole series. In case you don't know, Orin works for me. I use the philosophy of hire people smarter than you. I made an exception for Orin. And we have one-on-ones for regular syncs and regular connections. I'm keeping him small on purpose because he is going to get lots of airtime and full screen, so I can't see him mocking me right now. But I get to at least navigate some of the initial setup points. You can reach out to us and connect up with us at any point in time. If you like, I'll be here at least for the lunchtime conversation pieces, but you can connect with us on LinkedIn. And if you still happen to use the bird site Twitter, we're still there too. We decided to approach this from the perspective of myths. And the myths that exist within the discussion of careers inside of IT. And so we came up with at least five different myths we wanted to talk about. Some are true, some are not true, and then our observations on it. And the more importantly, we're giving you some ideas on what you can do to be successful at the very end if you embrace some of the concepts in these myths. Now, as you can see, we're very big on slides. So I'm just going to bring Orin back, because there's not a lot of information on that one slide. That isn't the first actual myth that comes up, which is information technology is a game for the young. Now, this is an interesting one. The perception that IT is a game for the young kind of stems back to some of the key principles that exist inside of working in IT, which is change is constant. You always have to learn. You have to stay on top of things and make it relevant to your workplace and to your skillset. We'll talk about each of those different buckets in just a bit. But if you think back, I've got kids, they're ranging in age from now, they're older, they're 19 and 21, and I've got friends that have younger kids that work in IT. But when I got started in IT three decades ago, I'm scared I'm actually saying that out loud, but three decades ago, and if you're like me of that particular age, that type of experience with 20 plus years of experience, we have lived through massive amounts of change, changing from terminals to PCs, PCs to client servers, to wide area networks, wide area connectivity, wide area connectivity to cloud connectivity, now the new stuff that's coming out in the AI world, all these different motions, and we've had to adapt. And it takes a lot of emotional and physical energy to keep on adapting and learning and working in this kind of environment. And so the concept of being young to be able to stay on top of things is very much top of mind for a lot of folks because of this amount of change that we do. Another thing that's interesting is back when we got started, there wasn't a lot of other gray hairs that we could go off and mentor from and work with. And if there were, they were very specialized. They did the mainframe stuff, they did the COBOL programming, they did the networking, and that's kind of it. They were specialized at that point, and we had to be very, very broad, which was a bit of a challenge at some point in time. And again, can become quite emotionally and physically and mentally draining to be able to do that. But our theory is, from our discussions that we've had and talked with other people, is that IT is a profession. As a profession, it's an extremely young profession compared to other professions that are out there, their knowledge-based professions. And you have to kind of look and see how they've evolved and apply that to us to see how that works. And so, Orange brought up the concept of other professions like accounting, like lawyers, like doctors and surgeons and stuff. And where do you see this parallel, Orange, as far as being able to compare the IT operations as a profession to these other, more classical knowledge-based professions? Okay, so one of the important things to recognize is that we do a lot of research about the profession and we look into it. I had to do a lot of research when I was spinning up the Windows Server hybrid certification. I had to go into a lot of market research to actually show that there was an audience for it. And one of the things that we've found is that the average age of someone who works as an IT professional, according to all of the jobs data, is about 45 to 50. So when we come to this myth of is technology a game for the young? Well, it was in the 1980s when we got into the field or the early 1990s, but the profession is aging. Now, there's some other interesting stats. When they've looked at where the peak of knowledge-based professions are, that is if you're working in a knowledge-based profession, where you tend to reach the absolute best of your performance, it tends to be in your mid-40s. And this not only includes things like accountants and lawyers who are working with obviously documents and information, but surgeons who are working with their hands, obviously operating on people, they're at their peak effectiveness as a surgeon at age 45. So if you think about what Zuckerberg said once, he wouldn't employ a developer who is over 30, and he recanted that. The idea that as knowledge workers that we would peak in youth, rather than like any other intellectual profession is probably false. Now, as Rick suggested, the profession only came into existence recently. So when we got started, there weren't old people. But I would suggest that in 20 years, you're going to be looking at people that have worked the entire spectrum of their lives in IT. And that's why we wanted to start thinking about this question of, well, what happens? How do I go from age 45 right through to retirement if I want to stay in IT? What are my options? What do I need to worry about? What do I need to keep in mind? One of the things I want to do, and one of the things I've always framed this as, and I've always bashed this back against Rick, against people like Jeffrey Snover, against Donovan Brown, all of the people that I talk to is that when you think about what IT professionals do, it is a bit like accountants and lawyers and doctors and surgeons. We're solving a set of problems. If you're an accountant, you're solving financial problems. We are solving organizational problems that businesses have using technical tools. And generally, especially when we're working for non-IT organizations, we're solving a generally slow-moving, mostly consistent set of business problems. And if you think about where your career is in terms of that idea of we're problem solvers, we start our careers being reactive. We start on the help desk. We're solving problems reactively. The problems come to us and we're solving simple things. Why can't I access this website? Why can't I print this document? How do I restore a backup? Those are reactive problems. They're problems that other people have often solved before because they're very common types of problems. But as your career develops over the course of decades, and that's how we have to think about our career because we're in the career for 40-plus years, we start to increase the complexity of the problems that we resolve. We move, if we're doing it right, from a very reactive stance to a proactive one. We go from fighting fires to stopping fires breaking out in the first point. So IT is not just a game for the young. It was when we got started that IT is a profession that can span your entire career. I'll add to that concept is that, again, this advice applies to no matter where you are in the spectrum. You start off and you're building your toolkit, you're building your tool belt of different things you can work with and apply to solving problems. And you have to grow that and work with that. And that applies if you're at the beginning of your career, if you're at the middle section of your career, you're simply keeping on and bulking up if you will from how that particular tool set is going to be applied to you and how that works. And that kind of brings us up to the next myth that we wanted to share. And this is where it gets a bit dodgy to be able to shift stuff that you should always be learning about the shiny new thing because everything you know about IT will become irrelevant after a few years.