Oct 20 2020 54 mins 5
Welcome to episode 96 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we discuss sponsorship, dreams, and the path to entrepreneurship with Ashley Connell of Prowess. Original Recording Date: 09-30-2020 Topics – Sponsorship, Dreams, and the Path to Entrepreneurship 02:20 – Meet Our Guest, Ashley Connell Ashley Connell is the CEO and Founder of Prowess, an organization that helps companies find expert talent by vetting and certifying talented women who took time off from the work force in some way and want to get back into it. The candidates could be caretakers, a leader who wants to take a step back, or someone who is after a career pivot. Prowess has built a job matching platform that matches not only skills and expertise to roles but also communication style, behavior style, personality style with the team the person would be joining. This produces a better candidate fit to the role. 3:28 – Finding Spiceworks and A Fairy Godmother She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a degree in public relations but had no intention of pursuing a career in it. Ashley started looking for internships in Marketing and stumbled across a small company in Austin called Spiceworks. She knew nothing about technology at the time but saw they had an opening in entry-level Marketing. Listen to Ashley’s story about the interview with her would-be manager and how it didn’t go exactly as she thought it might. In any case, Ashley became Jen Slaski’s first Marketing hire. She became a guinea pig for different Marketing projects. Once she tested them and got them off the ground they could be handed off to someone else. Ashley worked in the Austin office for about 4 years and then moved to London for a couple of years and helped open an office overseas, which helped her see Marketing from a global perspective. John and Nick originally met through the Spiceworks community. In much the same way, Nick met Ashley when she worked for Spiceworks at some local meetups in Austin. Nick digs into Ashley’s interview with Jen Slaski a little deeper. She was slightly overdressed for the interview and the culture at Spiceworks. Ashley was comfortable with asking questions and not knowing things. When talking to IT Professionals in the community, she made her role clear (helping to amplify the Spiceworks brand and connecting Marketers to IT Professionals). It wasn’t to know everything about technology. At the end of the day, Ashley’s knowledge of technology didn’t matter. People were more focused on building community than on their differences. 9:09 – What about the gender imbalance in the Spiceworks community and greater technology industry? The hard part about being a female is you do not know someone’s intention. You want to assume the best, but when people want to take you to coffee for career advice, for example, it may or may not be what they are bringing to the table. Spiceworks was a safe spot, but there were comments here and there that were inappropriate. Sometimes she had to pretend she didn’t hear them, which is horrible. If she could go back and change something, she would have said something. John makes the point that it is difficult early in your career to stand up to yourself in front of peers. Ashley talked to some women younger than her about these situations later. She had originally thought staying in those situations / being considered one of the guys was a good thing or a way to progress her career. "You should not have to be a part of the boys club to get to the next level." John says this is like a tacit allowance of harassment. It should be a constant 0 on the scale rather than getting to even a 1. Spiceworks was good at spotting this and calling it out, but at places later in Ash [...]
