Beautiful Valley Photo by Thomas Galler on Unsplash

CHIP EDWARDS

IT Manager - Technologist - Aspiring Innovator



"It is rarely a wast of time to pursue  something you are drawn to..."

Emilie Wapnick

"Success fuels passion more than  passion fuels success."

Dilbert creator Scott Adams

Work

I currently Manage IT Production Support for a medium-sized Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 implementation of ~1100 AX users with interfaces to web portals serving over 80,000 customers, 1500 service contractors, and 15,000 sales partners. I also manage support for a smaller Dynamics 365 F&O implementation.

On a normal day, I work with Managed Service Providers for Application and Infrastructure support; both onshore as well as offshore, to coordinate support for incidents, escalate issues, and coordinate code deployments. Part of my role is to also implement and manage IT controls and approve elevated access requests. Since my team also manages application access requests I manage and oversee the Service Requests for access and often need to assist in ensuring the proper approvals are acquired, as also occasionally providing the access.
Team building is critical to everything I do as I rely on a geographically diverse team from several different countries to ensure that application and infrastructure support are operating at peak efficiency.

I draw daily upon my experiences gained from over 20 years IT experience that range from startups to global It organizations.





This idea that everything you're supposed to do should fit into a passion verticle is unrealistic.

Terri Trespicio

"I have been impressed with the urgengy of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."

Leonardo da Vinci


Key Compentencies

Team Building * Managing & Selecting Managed Service Providers * Implementing IT controls * Implementing ITIL * Process Improvement



Aspirations

  • Do work that makes a difference in the future of the world.
  • Leave the world a better place for all of our children.
  • Contribute a sense of community to those I work with.

Specialization is great for insects, but it is not the normal state for people.

Ben Vandgrift

"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

Galileo Galilei

Musings

Changing how you think about your career when you are over 50


I have been recently wondering why I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up.

Even now in my 50's I still often wonder what I really want to be.
I do remember times where I thought I wanted to be a scientist, a chemist, an astronaut, a musician, and many other things. I just never had the burning desire to be one thing; to dedicate my totality to one pursuit.

I was born in a small town in Virginia about 45 minutes South West of Norfolk, Va. Close to the Naval Ship Yards.
Anyone raised in a small town knows the small town mentality and likely understands why I just wanted to getaway.

I joined the U.S. Navy back in the '80s, hoping to see more of the world and thinking that would help me find my calling. I figured I just had not been exposed to the right job yet. I thought if I was exposed to a wide variety of career paths, that magical calling would just happen and I could go all in.
Since I had a background in electronics I ended up working on weapons control systems and guided missile systems as my primary job in the Navy.

While I was in the Navy I did a lot of different things. I was a helmsman on a hydrofoil, I did drug interdiction as part of a joint task force. In my spare time, I became a technical diver doing some decompression dives.

I had that desire and passion for exploring new things. Yet somehow I began to settle as I began trying to advance my career. I had the thought that you gotta focus on just one thing if you want to be successful.

When I got out of the Navy and started a family I began to settle more. My wife informed me I could no longer do deep dives as I had family responsibilities and the important thing became providing for my family.

Now I am a bit further along in my career, my daughter has left the nest and during these chaotic times we are in and where I am for the most part working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself musing over the way I used to be. Always excited to try new things and ready for the next adventure.

Funny how things work out. I would not change a thing, yet I wonder what it would have been like if I had the opportunity to do things differently.
I just stumbled upon a couple of videos on Youtube that spoke about the desire to learn many things and exploring different disciplines being the normal mode of learning for humans. It has only been recently in humanities history that we have started to focus on single disciplines and thinking that specialization it the ticket to success.

All the videos were basically about the same thing; Polymathy. Where one person has the ability to learn different fields and that that knowledge from the different fields and create an intersection between each field and use the knowledge from one field to further ideas in other fields.

All of the videos I saw on Polymathy basically said that is the normal state of learning for humans. Further, they stated that you don't need to be an intellectual giant or a singularly special person to benefit from this form of learning or even to benefit the world.

In fact, I believe that is what a Technologist fundamentally is.
Someone who has the ability to cross over different technical disciplines and benefit their employers or customers.
While they may not have that deep knowledge of a specialist a Technologist makes up for it in many other ways.

I am thankful for those videos which gave me the reference and context to provide the following.

For those over 50 who still enjoy learning and being productive here are some of my key takeaways from my 55 + years of learning. Things you likely already know but take for granted or undervalue.

As you think about your career strategy; whether you are over 50; or just beginning this is just as relevant to you.
I hope you don't take as long as I did to understand the relevance.

  • Dedication and curiosity are not mutually exclusive. You will reap maximum rewards when you are dedicated to curiosity itself. Stated another way: "If you want to go for the maximum and not just the minimum, be driven by curiosity and not just by necessity" - Ben Vandgrift.
  • Learn the skills, not just the academic disciplines. Forge the new tools you need to do the job yourself without limiting your thinking. In this way, you can avoid the narrow mindsets and perspectives that plague so many others as those narrow mindsets are what keep us all from seeing what really matters.
  • It is not the smartest person who solves the problem fastest. it is the person with the broadest experiences and the person who has the most practice learning that solves the really hard less obvious problems.
  • The most important skill for a technologist is to learn how to learn new things. I prefer to learn a range of things that can help solve many different types of problems rather than to simply just specialize so that I can only solve specific types of problems.