When I was asked to write this my thoughts down for a blog to celebrate International Women’s Day, my first thought was, what the heck?! Advice, Me? More specifically on professional development. Ha! I don’t even RTFM!
I then had a flash back to 2019 when Jamf asked me to be on the first Women in Tech panel they had at JNUC. I admit, I did need some encouragement from other admins and my leadership and my team, as I may or may not have gone into hiding when asked to be on a panel. In the end, I wound up co-presenting with a fellow women mac admin on leadership, and it was a positive experience.
After this quick montage in my head, I cast my doubts aside and I realized ‘ok I might have some to share’. I can talk about a few key things in my career that I think could be helpful to other woman out there.
The 2025 UN International Women's Day (IWD) theme is, “For ALL Women and Girls: Rights. Equality. Empowerment.” This theme focuses on empowering the next generation, so I hope what I share helps to give some folks out there guidance and support.
Here’s more information about the history of IWD.
On the topic of professional development
This can be broken down into a few basic phases of your career. Just starting out / early career. Next would-be mid-career. Afterwards you are in your senior phase. After wards, well this lemur hasn’t yet reached that stage so I’ll skip it for now since it’s a mythical status as far as I know. For today’s post we will focus on the just starting out phase.
What I wish I knew when I was first starting out. Well back in my day we walked upstairs in the snow with flip flops and liked it. The first thing you should learn and expect is that you don’t know everything, and you will make mistakes. You are starting out, and this is normal. This leads me to the next point, learn all that is learnable. Be a sponge read all the kb’s you team has written (you do document stuff right … right). Why if you read the KBs and remember them when someone asks for help with a situation you will know what to do. This will make the end user happy and you will get noticed as someone who might know a thing or two.
This is the easy part. Remember when I mentioned you will make mistakes? Related to that is learning the great skill of how is how to take feedback. I am going to make an assumption that feedback is coming from a positive place, and you are not working in a hostile environment.
Getting feedback is hard to receive. You might view it as being attacked or criticized, especially after a mistake. The key thing hear is to take a step back; acknowledge a there was error. Someone is trying to give feedback on what happened and trying to help you understand and work out how it was made a give you suggestions to adjust your work or tips to avoid making the mistake the next time.
I absolutely acknowledge that this is making a lot of assumptions (especially around your environment) however during my career I have been fortunate to have folks who have supported me.
Returning to the topic of reading KBs and being a sponge. After you developed a reputation as someone who RTFM, start learning some of the other systems that your ocmpany uses. It doesn’t matter if it’s, Jamf, or Jimmy’s awesome system. One of the first places you can go is to the mac admins slack (assuming you are a mac admin) for windows you could go to the windows discord. Here you can learn all about the various systems and tools and ask questions. I can still recall hitting a brick wall, I asked a question and got multiple responses (when one of the more well known folks in the community replied I might have fan girled just a wee bit).
Some other things that can help you grow are certifications or User Groups. For example, certifications, the Jamf training and certifications can help you show peeps that you know what you are doing. There is also the other side of the house, with Microsoft’s training . Also, there are also user groups. Those are a great way to meet other admins, and vendors. One that has been very helpful for me is the Jamf user group in NYC.
This just my personal thoughts based on my own experiences. YMMV.
