From Military Signaler to State CIO: Alan Cunningham’s Unfiltered Career Journey | Ep032

In this captivating episode of Career Downloads, Manuel Martinez sits down with Alan Cunningham, a technology leader with a rich and varied background. Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Alan shares his remarkable journey from working at age 12 to becoming the CIO for the State of Nevada.

Alan walks us through his early fascination with electronics, building sound-to-light units for his DJing career despite being colorblind. His path took him through the British Army where he worked as a signaller, which sparked his journey into technology.

After moving to the US in 1995, Alan quickly established himself in the tech world, running a computer store by his second day. Throughout his career, he’s worked as an IT technician, software expert, consultant, ISO for Washoe County School District, and ultimately CIO for the State of Nevada.

What stands out in this conversation is Alan’s unwavering commitment to honesty and integrity, which has guided his career decisions even when they led to challenging transitions. He offers practical wisdom for those entering the tech field, emphasizing the importance of building a solid foundation of knowledge through help desk positions or working at small computer stores where problem-solving skills are constantly tested.

Alan also shares valuable insights about critical thinking, continuous learning, and the reality behind trending technologies like AI and cloud computing. His straightforward assessment of these tools cuts through marketing hype to reveal their true utility.

Whether you’re just starting your career or looking to advance to leadership positions, this episode provides a wealth of practical advice and inspiration from someone who’s navigated the ever-changing technology landscape for four decades.

Listen to the full episode to learn how Alan’s commitment to quality work and straightforward communication has shaped his successful career in technology.

#CareerDownloads #TechLeadership #CyberSecurity #CIOAdvice

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn more about their career and their experiences, to really uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Alan Cunningham. So we’ve crossed paths a couple of times, most recently at a couple of networking events. But when I first met him, he was actually the CIO for the state of Nevada on public sector. Kind of speaking to a couple of contacts that we have in common, they mentioned they had a very interesting story, interesting background, looking at his profile. So me and him have chatted prior to this and I feel like there’s gonna be a lot of good information and a lot of good stories just for people to kind of understand, you know, again, and just find areas that they can find, that you can find that would be beneficial in your own career and help you improve and progress as you manage that. So with that, I will bring on Alan Cunningham.

Alan: Good afternoon, how are you?

Manuel: Doing very well, thank you for taking the time to come and speak and really just share your experiences.

Alan: Yeah, thanks for the invite. It’s always good to try and give back to the community in whichever way we can.

Manuel: Definitely. If you could just start by just giving us a brief summary of kind of what your current position is and just some of the roles and responsibilities that you’re in charge of today.

Alan: At the moment, I’m working with Cyroot.io You had Asal Gibson on your last show, who is the CEO. I actually worked with her at the contract position at Clark County School District about a year and a half ago. We both got along really well. So when my contract finished with the county, Asal asked if I’d become the CIO. So really I’m the lead technical contact for the company. We’re working a lot on federal, state and government bids. So I look at all the technical requirements and see if we don’t have that talent in-house, where can we reach out to partners and make partnerships to be able to satisfy those bid requirements. So that’s mainly my duties, if you want to call on that at the moment. I’m also on the board of the Cyroot Academy, which is Asal’s nonprofit, which provides free technical training to transitioning military veterans or transitioning military and veterans and underserved communities who are looking for technical training. I’ve been a trainer most of my adult life in various subjects. So I think that’s really important. I’m a British army veteran. I’m not an American army veteran. So I do resonate with the needs of that because military is the same the world over, whichever way you go for it. So that’s really what I’m up to right now.

Manuel: And I kind of looked at your profile and I did see that there’s a bit of security background. So I’m really interested to kind of dig into that, as the conversation progresses. But really at this point, what I want to kind of now transition into is, if you can kind of give us just a little bit of background of where you grew up and eventually what got you kind of interested in technology. Everybody’s different, different stages in life.

Alan: Yeah, and it’s funny, like once upon a time in a land far, far away, that lived an ogre, because everybody goes with the accent. So I always get the Mike Myers thing with Shrek. And it’s great, like I was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, Eastern General Hospital. The reason that kind of came up in top of mind, when I applied for my citizenship here after 20 years, I had two green cards. And I went in for my second INS interview. And the lady standing behind her desk with her back to me, she said, sit down, Mr Cunningham. And then she kind of turned her head and said, which maternity hospital were you born in in Edinburgh? And I’m like, well, Eastern General. And she said, well, I was born in Simpson’s Hospital, which is this other maternity hospital two weeks after you. So it was just serendipitous that that happened, which led to me getting all the easy questions on the test, which was funny. But that whole citizenship process was enlightening. And it’s interesting when you look into some of the coincidental. I don’t think they were coincidental. I think they happened. We can talk about that later as well. But so born in Scotland, lived in the country until I was 19. Left school when I was 15 and a half. I’d been working since I was 12 and a half. Evenings, weekends, anything I could get. Then at 14, when I was 14, I started working in a record store, which led to DJing. And eventually, it’s like I’m a great Scottish comedian because I can go around elliptically around the subject and then come back to it again. Billy Connolly, if you ever look him up, he’s phenomenal at that. He’ll talk on something for 20 minutes and then come right back to where you thought you were going in the start. So once I got into DJing, I started building my own electronics for sound to light units, because you couldn’t they were very expensive at the time. So I did some studying at the library at the time because you couldn’t just jump on YouTube because this is pre-internet days and start designing my own PCB boards and putting transistors and stuff together, which was a major challenge for me because I happen to be fully colorblind. So that’s a major challenge for more jobs than you can imagine. Just totally barred just because you’re colorblind. And then once I DJed for years and I joined the army and I’d been into CB radio and just general technology stuff. And then when I joined the military, I was in the infantry and one of the parts of those is communication. So I became a signaller doing radio communications for AhF, satellite, VHF, bus transmissions, all that kind of stuff, encryption, and then transitioned as the military started to get computers. You know, it was like, well, here’s a piece of technology. You know technology. Fix it. No training. No, nothing. I remember the first kind of computer I worked on was a word star word processor. It had a single line of LCD text that you could go in and had a daisy wheel printer. And I remember fixing those. And just before I left the military and came here in 1995, I was working at the signal school as an instructor teaching instructors how to teach. And we were putting in a local area network there. So I was working with the civilian company, digging trenches, laying coax cable, putting on 51 resistors, building star topology networks and ring topology networks and learning all about that before I left the military. And the British Army has some similar programs, the American Army, for transitioning out of military service. So I did like six months at a local college, public community level college, it would be here, on networking, database design, IT administration. So that kind of set me up when I arrived here in 95. I got a job at a local computer store as an IT tech. I was running it the second day I was there, because I just can’t stand disorder. I have to put order where chaos is. And that was great. A place called Technology Center still open today. Curtis and Tim, if you get a chance to watch it, keep going guys. And thanks for everything you taught me. Those are two guys who worked there.

Manuel: And I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I question there. So understanding, running the coaxial cable, doing the trenches, was it something that you… I mean, you were part of not just laying the coaxial, but you actually had to dig the… You were doing everything top to bottom?

Alan: Yeah. It was on a military base. And I was kind of like the liaison between the civilian company and the military side. So when it needed done, we just got it done. So we had to figure out… This is before you had the standards where you had to put two inch conduit, and you have to have this space and all that stuff. So we were just digging trenches. I just had a pickaxe and I’d just dig a trench, lay some coax cable, run it up a wall, staple it to the wall, put a BNC connector, the British Navy Connector on it, which is what… In case you didn’t know what BNC stood for, that’s what BNC stands for, and trying to figure out why it wouldn’t communicate. Nine times out of ten, it was the 50 ohm resistors were never set correctly. Either they weren’t put on properly or the resistance was wrong within the cap, so you’d get a new one. And you have broadcast storms and all the other things that were problems with ring or token ring technology back in the time.

Manuel: Okay. I just kind of was curious, because a lot of times people say, “Hey, I did all this,” and sometimes they oversee it, but understanding that you actually did all the physical labor and all that, it’s good to know and understand.

Alan: Yeah, I’m a big believer in you need to know not everything about the technology, but you need to know enough so that people can’t blow smoke your way. And that’s why I continually learn. And right these days, it’s all about AI, which is “Ain’t Intelligent”, and it’s automated… Sorry, “Automatic Iteration.” There’s no intelligence involved. But I have those heated discussions with people because they think it’s the latest and greatest platform. Oh, blockchain this and encryption that. And it’s like, well, the reality is, and you’ve seen that on my LinkedIn pages, I’m the reality checker. Because I don’t know, I’ve lost count of the amount of times business leaders have come to me, “Hey, we want to use this latest and greatest technology.” And you go, “Well, really, it’s not quite there because we have this thing called marketing, and marketing always oversell what it is, and sometimes totally misrepresent what the capabilities are, because it fits whatever the marketing scheme is at the time that they want to sell.” So I get into heated discussions about that regularly.

Manuel: And I can imagine that that’s something that, again, you having that base foundational knowledge and having the experience is just understanding, like you said, you’re that fact checker and making sure that it’s not really 100% the way that it works.

Alan: Yeah, I just read a really good book by Matthew Syed called Rebel Ideas, and it really quantified and solidified a lot of the things that I’ve done throughout my career. So that was a pretty satisfying reading. If anybody is looking for a good book, definitely worthwhile. One thing I really love about living in Clark County is the Clark County Library system is phenomenal. Absolutely amazing. I couldn’t tell you the last time I went to a library, but the online stuff is just amazing. And I have a great respect for librarians and library systems everywhere. I remember being at school, and the school library wasn’t really good. So you want to go to the local council library, but it shut before I left school. So the only time I could go is Saturday mornings, because it was shut on a Sunday. So I’d be standing waiting for that to open at 9 a.m. on a Saturday. And I remember spending hours and hours. I’d take a sandwich and some water and sit there and mainly for my stamp collection, because it used to be a huge stamp collector. And I’d sit there and value stamps and then try and figure things out. And it’s really difficult for kids. Like yesterday, we were at the CCSD volunteer system down at the World Trade Center here in Vegas. And they brought 500 plus kids in to do three events. There was resume writing, interview skills and networking skills. So I was part of the interviewing skills. And so yesterday, maybe did mock interviews with 15, 20 students. And they just always have the information at their fingertips. And the ability just to be directly connected to an expert from Yale or Harvard or any of the thousands of online schools, these brilliant mathematicians or brilliant physicists, biologists, geologists, that you can pick their brains, which I had to go to the library and pull a book off the shelf. And it was probably 10 years out of date. And if I wanted to communicate with somebody, I had to write a letter, snail mail. I love the fact that on a device like this, I have access to answers to questions, which allow me to then iterate faster. And that kind of goes to the whole iteration thing on AI. It just iterates faster through answers. And it has this huge bank of answers. So it looks like it’s coming up with an intelligent answer, but it’s really not.

Manuel: When you kind of mentioned that we have all this knowledge at our fingertips, and it does make it easy to kind of quickly and get the answer. Do you think a lot of times that because we have such easy access and such quick access, that a lot of times people in general, and I know I am guilty of it, is we don’t understand fundamentally or we just we get the answer that we’re looking for. And we don’t tend to dive a little bit deeper. Whereas like when you mentioned like with the library, and again, I also understand it’s very individualistic, right? Some people will go through and they get what they need and will follow back up and, you know, continue to understand, again, maybe not to be an expert, but maybe instead of that surface, I’m gonna call it 100 level knowledge, maybe they’ll dig a little bit deeper to 200, 250. Do you think that that’s something, is that a trend that you’re seeing?

Alan: No, I think, you know, that AI is like the internet that’s like driving, that’s like using an electric screwdriver. It’s a tool that allows you to get a particular task done. Right. And I like to use, you know, family members as examples. And, you know, my wife was doing an online degree, and she didn’t use the computer a lot. But she learned what she needed to learn to complete the online degree. You know, it’s like me, I don’t lift the hood on my truck. If something, if a light comes on, I may look up to see if it’s a serious error. But otherwise, I’m driving it to Honda West and say, fix it. Right. Because it’s not my expertise. You know, and I can, I understand there are people who work on vehicles who are interested in it. Like I’ve changed my brake pads, I’ll change my oil if I have to, but I’m more likely to do that on my motorcycles. Because I, I, two wheels move, sorry, four wheels move my body and two wheels move my soul. So I’m a massive motorcyclist. And I learn how to work on those because it interests me. If it doesn’t interest you, then you don’t have the passion. There are things you have to know, like almost everybody knows how to use email. But not a lot of people know about DMARC and SMTP and routing and the other things that support email. They’re just like, oh, I press the button, it goes and I get one back. That’s all I need to know. You know, because when something goes wrong, you know, like when something goes wrong with my wife, she just goes, Alan, fix it. And I either figure out what the problem is and fix it or figure out how to get it fixed. And that’s where, you know, knowing the tool sets that you need to maximize your efficiency and solve the challenge you have in front of you. That’s, that’s all it is. It’s just a tool. People use AI for image generation. Other people use AI to write resumes or, hey, give me a framework for a PowerPoint presentation on SMTP routing, for instance. And great, you get a framework. And the mistake most people make is, unfortunately, most people are lazy. So they’ll copy and paste it and just go with that instead of reading and understanding and making it human again. There’s examples of a lawyer who’s who got disbarred because he wrote all the legal papers with AI. I can’t remember which one it was. I was going to say ChatGPT, but I’m not sure if it was. And all the references were false and totally incomplete. I mean, the judge threw it out and they ended up getting disbarred. So there are consequences to actions and consequences to lack of action, too.

Manuel: No, yeah, I 100 percent agree with you there. So I know I kind of derailed the conversation a little bit, but I’ll go back. And now, you know, like you mentioned, we’re going to kind of circle back. So you mentioned that you ended up running that local store and then kind of what progressed from there and how did you kind of continue on.

Alan: So we we had a lot of small to medium sized clients, especially in the medical field. So I started as a hardware tech. You know, doing PCs, servers, running cable, crimping cable, putting runs in walls and that type of stuff. And then a few of our clients were on a DOS based medical billing software called MediSoft. And they were moving to a Windows based system and they couldn’t find anybody to work with them on it. So my boss at the time said, hey, do you want to go get trained on this Windows based system and then we’ll help transition everybody. So I went and got the training on the MediSoft system at the time. Met a lot of great people. People I’m still in touch with these days. That’s got almost 30 years ago now. Karen Moore, she was the MediSoft dealer in Hawaii and she was a registered nurse and she just retired to Florida from Hawaii to Florida. I’m like, OK, what’s the difference? But she was phenomenal. And what got me into the start, get me into the software side and designing, you know, user interfaces, et cetera. There was a product called Telemagic, which was an early rapid database development tool from the CRM side, you know, customer relationship management. So I got into doing that. And as I became more and more of a, oh, should I dare I say the word expert, more experienced in using those particular softwares, people started to seek me out just for that. So I moved away a little bit more away from the hardware side and more into the software side and a lot of customer relationship management. You know, we had some great technicians, you know, and the story with great building computers, great at doing server stuff. Don’t let them ever talk to a customer. You know, just kind of people, you just want to shut the door and put the food under the door and things get done. Phenomenal techs, but very little customer skills. And, you know, an interest, just an interesting story. I used to be the only certified management tally technician on the West Coast. So management tally were a huge printer company out of, I think, Seattle, and they did all the nine pin line printers for all the casinos on the West Coast. Right. So these massive, they were probably four and a half, five feet long, nine print, and they did all those huge reports for the casinos on the folding paper with all the holes on the side. So I used to fly up and down realigning, put a new print heads and fixing them, stuff like that. And they all run off the AS400s. Then AS400 came up with a module which would then allow you to output to CSV or PDF just killed the printer service technician like within a couple of weeks because everybody bought the AS400 one because they wanted to output CSV, get it into Excel, and then they could start doing analytics on it rather than go through all this big paper report and hand input the stuff. So that’s how technology moves and can move as quick. And we’ve seen throughout the years technology that’s all the latest and greatest. And then then it’s gone.

Manuel: You kind of mentioned that you got into the software side and became more experienced or more knowledgeable in that realm. And you mentioned, you know, having quality technicians and, you know, technology changes fast. Is that something that you’ve seen over time that how do you how would you recommend or just kind of, again, looking back on your on your own experience, how do you balance becoming the expert in an area or specializing versus, you know, making sure that you still have kind of that that breadth of knowledge instead of just kind of going deep in a specific area? Because again, there’s not. I wouldn’t say that one way is better than the other or, you know, just in your experience, what do you see is?

Alan: I see people who are specialists are usually guaranteed work unless the technology totally goes away. You know, like that’s one of the reasons why the man’s mentality story is it went. You know, so, for instance, try to think a language that is not around very cobalt. Well, cobalt, no, that’s that’s an outlier right there. But, you know, like some of the early Java languages and things like that, it’s like, OK, like I remember at UNR, I was interviewing students who wanted like basic tech jobs, but the stuff they were learning in college was four or five years out of date. You know, it was just the way the the education system was not keeping up with the pace of technology within the industry. One of my tenants is if you if you can think critically, you know, so critical thinking, then you can apply that critical thinking to whichever language you want. I one of the students I spoke to yesterday was fluent in Spanish, fluent in English, and was studying French. He said, well, what I what I do about coding? Like, well, coding is just like learning a language. You got to know how to speak. So if you can think critically and solve the steps and the and the challenge, then you can. OK, what language am I going to use to put this in? Ruby on Rails, is it Java? Is it C sharp? Is it Python? You know, whatever it happens to be that suits or best suits the challenge at the time. And because you’ve got that critical thinking process in your mind, then learning the language becomes much easier. So, you know, I’ve got some really good friends who’ve been in the software industry for 40 years, like I’ve been in the tech industry. And, you know, Dale Paul is just like one of those gurus that is, you know, can solve almost anything. But a lot of it comes down to he thinks critically about that. He’s a he’s a veteran, Navy veteran. And some of the some of the programming and he did when he was in the Navy on the missile control systems, things like that are still being used today. You know, it’s it’s interesting how some parts of technology are there for a long time. You know, cobalt is a great example. You know, why isn’t it being replaced? Because it works. And it continues to work like AS400. It should be replaced, but it’s a solid machine that runs all the time. And, you know, other examples, Netware, you know, from Novell. One of the best file system and the phrase application server was never coined anywhere until NT4 came out. And right at that time, I remember it well because I just become a certified Novell Administrator and Novell went to all their gold partners, you know, who were making millions of support and selling and stuff like that and said, oh, we’re going to take all the support in-house. So all your tech support stuff, all those dollars you’re making for tech support, you know, we’re taking them. And all the gold resellers went, oh, well, there’s this new thing from Microsoft called NT4 So we’re going to go sell that. And then Novell just disappeared. Didn’t totally disappear. It took a few years, but they

Manuel: They weren’t the dominant force that they were.

Alan: And I mean, I was in the dentist office and they said our printers just stop working. And it was they just called me in. So I went in. I’m like, OK, where is your print server? We don’t know. So I started tracing cables and CAT5 cables went over the top of a wall and it was a solid wall. I’m like, what’s on the other side that said, oh, we don’t know that was done when we moved in. We just put the wall up. OK, so I got a ladder, moved the ceiling tiles. Went over, pulled the ceiling tiles to the side, got my flashlight out because it was pretty dark. Oh, and there’s a server sitting back there. So I got another ladder, put it over the top, climbed down, fired it up or looked at the screen. It was a Novell print server. It had been running for something like seven hundred and seven hundred and fifty plus days. So I restarted the print server, climbed up the ladder down the other side. Can you guys print now? Yeah, printing happens. No problem. Climb up with the ladder, back to the ceiling, back down and just left it.

Manuel: Wow. And it’s funny, like you mentioned, the critical thinking and understand the problem solving. It seems like having that type of knowledge and having that experience has kind of helped you know, like later on. Hey, where’s your print server? Like, you know, knowing that, OK, there’s cables, there’s things that go run by, whereas, you know, there might be situations where if somebody doesn’t have that experience, they’ll go through a look. I wouldn’t know how to go through and do that. So in the age now, especially with with cloud, do you think it’s still beneficial to understand a lot of because I do teach part time and one of the things that I’ve noticed is students seem to struggle with the concept of the cloud. And I think a lot of that’s because that they don’t understand, you know, the foundations of like a data center or server room. So is that something that you feel people should, you know, if you’re looking to get into cloud, maybe having that base level knowledge or is it dependent on?

Alan: Everybody needs to go start on an I.T. help desk somewhere or work for a small computer company where you get exposure to those types of troubleshooting. You know, because it it’s like, oh, I have a I have an error when I try and open up a PDF, for instance. Now, when a customer is paying you per hour, you can sit and try and troubleshoot that for hours and hours and hours. And I used to get a lot of my clients this way. I’d go in and be like, oh, I paid this other guy six hours and it still hasn’t been fixed yet. And I go restart it. I’m like, is it working? Oh, it’s working. Oh, you’re fantastic. I’m like, I don’t know why the guy didn’t restart it? 99.9% of errors can usually be fixed by restarting it in the proper way. You know, whether it’s bringing this ever down soft, you know, we’re bringing it down hard. All right. So especially in the later versions of Windows, because they they’re built in recovery was never what it was advertised by marketing to be. So you ended up sometimes making things worse. End users. God bless them because, you know, they made a lot of money off end users in the past. But the people who have a little bit of knowledge and overstep, you know, those those types of users are kind of dangerous. You know, it’s like that with cyber. Oh, I know enough about this to get into trouble. And knowing when to say, I don’t know, I’m going to ask somebody. Where most things come into trouble is when there’s nobody to ask. That’s where people feel, oh, I want to go. You know, if I if I didn’t have the money, or I didn’t have a Honda dealership near, then I may be forced to pick up the hood on my truck and make some expensive mistakes. All right. So that’s kind of what happens with with tech. But for anybody who’s new and getting into, you know, people say, oh, I want to get into cyber. And I like, well, what do you know about technology? If you don’t know how the knee bone connects to the thigh bone, you’re in trouble. Right. You’re you’re you’re not starting from a basis. It’s like building a house. You don’t build a house without putting a solid foundation in. So the solid foundation that you need in this industry is you need solid foundation of basic principles, basic computing, I.T. What does TCP IP do? What is the SYN ACK handshake? Believe it or not, I talked to a person who just finished a master’s in cybersecurity who couldn’t tell me what the SYN ACK handshake was and what it was for. I was gobsmacked. I was like, OK, you’re not touching any of my stuff. You definitely not. And I’m not hiring you. Unfortunately, somebody else hired them. But it was just phenomenal that they didn’t have that basis. Because I don’t see how you can possibly be effective from a troubleshooting standpoint and an alert standpoint if you don’t have a good working knowledge of how the Internet works. And when I say Internet, I mean, from your PC through your network out into the Internet back again.

Manuel: Kind of going back to like that specialist versus the generalist. Is it marketing? Is it what people are kind of putting out that a lot of times they see these and I’m going to say cybersecurity is a specialist area is they try to go jump, jump straight into a specialty instead of kind of like you mentioned, starting as a generalist, doing the help desk, doing those those more generalist type of roles and then kind of going in like, OK, I can try and go be a DBA and sure, maybe I’ll learn it. But if I’m not using that database in a vacuum, right, people are going across the network. You know, hey, if I write this super long query and it’s going across the network and it’s timing out, why is that? Like, have to understand, hey, I’ve got to optimize this query better because it’s going across the network. There’s latency in any number of areas. So as you’re going through, you’ve got into software, it sounds like you’re kind of doing a little bit of consulting and from what I kind of remember, the consultancy. So what what is it? It kind of leads you down the path of, you know, I’m going to say more and you’ll correct me if I’m wrong, is more it seems like the more management route at some point, you know, because it sounded like, you know, you’re doing the hands on and you’re kind of moving up. So what is it that drove you or made you decide that that’s the path you want to kind of take?

Alan: Well, when I when I worked for technology center, the next position I went for was IT manager at a company called Microflex who made latex gloves, they had a big factory on the West End, started the east, the West end of Reno, and I ran their whole shop. I was the IT manager. So I learned a lot more about management skills. I didn’t really have a staff at the time. It was just me. But I remember the first time I walked into a manager’s meeting and the CEO company was there, the CFO, CEO, etc. And they all looked at me like, well, what are you doing here? I said, well, do you want your computers to work or not? Well, what do you mean? Well, I need to know what your plans are for the next 6, 12, 18 months, 24 months so that I can build the infrastructure and make sure it’s in place so you don’t bump up against the technology problem. Oh. And so after that, I was invited to every meeting because they understood that if the technology wasn’t in place, it could halt their forward progress, their growth. And I’ve seen it before where Monday morning, the head of sales calls up the IT director and goes, hey, I’ve got 50 new reps starting today. Where are their computers? Nobody told me about that. No budget, no licenses. People really don’t understand all the infrastructure that goes in place to support that type of move or that type of increase in growth.

Manuel: What gave you the insight or what is it that kind of developed for you to kind of understand that that’s something that it’s required, right? That communication and understanding, hey, I need to be there to plan ahead of time. In my experience, there’s people that get that and understand it and are able to communicate it. And there’s other people that, you know, you mentioned like, hey, we run into this roadblock. And at that point now I’m trying to fight a fire. And there’s that that ability to think forward. Again, I’m going to say forward thinking or planning ahead. Is that a skill that you developed over time? Is it just based on experience on everything else you’ve done? Is there somebody that you kind of modeled that after?

Alan: No, I think it’s always just based on experience you learn incrementally through small mistakes or you see other people making mistakes. You go, well, I’m going to do a root cause analysis on that. And why did that mistake happen? Why did you go out of business? You know, and you can trace it back and go, oh, it was this issue. You know, we had when I was at the computer store, if I jump back a little bit, we had a bunch of, you know, small businesses who came to us with issues with their computers. And so, you know, I think it was a plumber. I think he was a plumber. Came with these computers like, hey, all my QuickBooks stuff is on this. My kid was doing stuff online and now I can’t get to anything. So we looked at it and, you know, I had been wiped. And like I said, where’s your backup? What’s a backup? No idea. Now, and he went out of business because all his creditors knew how much he owed them, but all the customers went, oh, you can’t prove we owe you money. Sorry, we’re not paying. And, you know, those are direct consequences of not using technology properly. And technology is a tool. One thing I’ve learned over time is it helps if you have somebody who can translate from business English to technology English and then from technology English back to business English. And business English is usually thought has a dollar sign in front of it. Dollar sign. It can be time, hardware, whatever, but it’s like, how much is it going to cost the business? And how do you translate the fact that, hey, if you don’t have this, then your potential loss or your potential risk is X. And that’s kind of what led me down to the governance risk and compliance route later in my career is actually trying, making sure I could verbalize that to business leaders and make them understand that you have a potential for loss here. Well, why? Like reputation. Look at Target. Look at the, I mean, Target still. Hasn’t recovered from that huge breach. You know, you look at their, their customers are down and you can quantify what that cost them and continues to cost them over time. And I think that especially CFOs and CEOs aware of that, but they have to balance it with what shareholders want if they’re public. And, you know, one of the big tenets and security is you don’t spend a million dollars protecting $10,000. You know, it’s what your crown jewels, where do you put them and what level of risk and where do you get to where you sign off on the risk and say, you know, I’ve spent $80,000 protecting this. It, you can’t afford from a business perspective to spend any more on that. So I’m going to accept the risk either buy cyber insurance, whatever you got to do, or you know, you’ve done as much as you can do to mitigate. Now I just accept. And I can’t transfer it because I can’t buy cyber insurance or I can’t transfer it anywhere else. I’m just going to accept it.

Manuel: And I think you bring up a good point is understanding how to do that translation. And even if you’re not dealing directly with, you know, C level or directors, because that’s one of the things that I noticed in my career, I was able to not only just progress to like an individual contributor and move my way up, but be able to kind of get a lot of the projects or the funding that I needed is by being able to explain and not only explain, but quantify. Like if I could quantify, we need this piece of software, you know, if we buy this additional hardware, yes, it’s going to cost this. Here’s the efficiency gains. Here’s, you know, instead of me spending 20 hours a week, you know, doing this, I can cut that down to maybe 12 hours. Okay. Well, what is that hourly rate? What’s that over time? Because that’s really what they’re looking at. Okay. Well, it’s not just my time. It’s somebody else’s time, you know, and being able to kind of go through that. Same thing is that you think it’s experience. Are there ways that, you know, kind of looking back, if you wanted to say, “Alan, I think you should pick up this skill. And how would you pick that up quickly?” Because again, it’s not an easy skill that.

Alan: There’s much more education available now. And I use the word “education” as opposed to “instruction” because there’s a little bit of a difference there. The quality can be, it’s dodgy. You know, so trying to find something, courses that are worthwhile, there are respected bodies like ISC squared (ISC2) and ISACA who have great courses, but they’re expensive. You know, I think that last CSSP I did was like $9,000. And that’s not affordable for people who are starting off. Now, admittedly, that’s a more advanced level course for, and you have to have a lot of experience before that. But to go back to your point about how do you learn or how do you pick that stuff up? It’s experience and learning. And some learning can be tangential, but other learning you go to a teaching establishment, you take a set course and there are fundamentals in that course. And then you can start recognizing touch points between your experience and that fundamental knowledge. And then you see other things that are like, “Oh, I wish I’d known that back then.” Now, we can’t know everything immediately. So being continually open to learning, I think that’s essential for anybody who’s going to be in technology because A.) technology changes all the time, and B.) you should be naturally curious about new things. In that book I mentioned, there’s a lot about recombination of technology. One of the examples they give is how they invented suitcases with wheels. Because these were two separate technologies and somebody combined them together and said, “Hey, that should be great to have a suitcase with wheels, I don’t have to carry it.” But I won’t spoil the story in the book, but it wasn’t as easy as that for the person who first thought about it because that’s part of the rebel idea thing. And as I was reading the words, I was thinking back to some of the things I’ve done in my past and I’m like, “Wow, that’s the same thing.” I took two different technology ideas, put them together, and came up with a solution for customers. So I think that’s important is recognizing, “Here’s a need or a challenge. What technologies do I have at my disposal that can help with that? Do they need…?” These days, you mentioned cloud. Cloud is just somebody else’s computer, that’s all it is. And the unfortunate thing about that is most business owners, CEOs, CFOs, etc., think that, “Oh, if it’s somebody else’s computer, then I don’t have to pay to run it.” I said, “No, you still need the same skill set, you still need the same people to get the job done, because the job doesn’t go away, it’s just the hardware goes over there.” And I’ve read several studies that depending on the type of computer environment you’re running, it’s actually, in the long term, five to ten years, much more expensive to be in the cloud than it is to have hard iron in your data center or in your factory or whatever it happens to be.

Manuel: Now, I’ll kind of go back. So now you’re in this management role, obviously you’re picking up skills and understanding how to relay business problems to executives, you’re getting invited to meetings. How do you progress and what makes you want to kind of continue to go down that route from a manager now, like I mentioned at the beginning, at some point you end up being a CIO and going that route. So what’s that path or what’s the decision-making process that makes you say, “I’m going to continue to go there,” and not having been a CIO, and this would probably be the first time that I can say that I’ve actually asked this question, is what’s the interview process? So you’re kind of looking back, what are the skills that you had to gain along that way to where you go to be a CIO. It’s a different set of questions, it’s a different way to answer, you have to rely on your experience, whereas me as an individual contributor, I’m getting asked about technologies, how do I handle certain situations? I’m sure there is that personality component to it, but it’s completely different.

Alan: Yeah, and then it was a long trip from there to, for instance, State CIO. I ran my own consulting company in Reno for multiple years once I left Microflex. The management side, I got up to like seven or eight employees at one time and then when the recession hit, we scaled back again. And then I went into the security side, there was a lady from San Francisco who came up to Reno, wanted to start a cybersecurity company, couldn’t find a local talent. I met her at a coffee meet, designed her, actually wrote on a napkin, this is what you need to do with your network. So two weeks later, she called me up and offered me a job as their CISO. So I said, okay, that’s when I ran my own consulting company, I had 50, 70 clients. So I looked at the financials and it looked like she had a couple of years worth of operating revenue, only to find out that these were false financials that she showed me. So I handed off my clients to other people that I trusted in Reno and started work with her. And then like five, six weeks later, she walked in and said, I’m closing the company because I’ve run out of money. I’m like, how did you spend all… So there I was without any work on my comp… because I’m all passed all my customers on. And a good friend of mine, Art Verline, who runs Screenwave Systems in Reno said, hey, come back and be a tech. Because he knows that I, his customers would like me, I get the job done, they can trust it 100%. So I was doing that for a while. And then the ISO position was being advertised for Washoe County School District for information security officer. So I interviewed with that the CIO at the time was Ed Gracia. And I remember it was a, it was an interview in part, the interview was a 10 minute presentation on how you would lay out, you know, the the pathway to get where they wanted to go with it. So I put a lot of work into that and was selected as the ISO for that. Just at that time, just before I started, I went to a motorcycle race in Europe, crashed and broke my back. I was in ICU for a while and was three or four days late, I think coming back. I communicated that to him. And I remember we were right back Thursday night via ambulance from San Francisco. And I got up on Friday morning with my body cast on and went to work. And he’s like, what are you doing here? I got a job to do, you know, apologize for the days. And he really realized that that’s what my work ethic was. So I spent four years there as the ISO, building relationships with the superintendent, with the board members, because they’re, you know, with legal counsel. And it was it was interesting. You know, there’s, there’s always a discussion around or debate around who should the CISO or ISO report to. Because when you report to the CIO, it’s definitely a conflict in interest. So there, at one time I was reporting to the chief of school police. Right. Because they wanted to try that. Didn’t work out too well. So went back to reporting to the CIO. And then the job opening came up for state CIO.

Manuel: So before you get to that, that additional state CIO, there’s two questions that came up in what you mentioned before. So one was, obviously, there’s a financial component to when this lady closes down the doors and you know, you happen to go back to be a tech. That decision making process, was it clearly just financial? Or is it, you know, sometimes it’s hard to kind of have a little bit of humility or, you know, kind of swallow that pride and say, well, this is my skill set level. I’m not going to do that. I’ll just wait it out and try and find something at what I deem is my level, as opposed to, you know what, I’m not above that. I’ve done it before. Like you said, I have that experience. So what is that, you know, what kind of what, what’s the thought process as you’re going through that?

Alan: Do you want to eat? Do you want to have somewhere to live? You have bills to pay. But I mean, as I said, I mentioned right at the start, I mean, I started working when I was 12 and a half. I’ve never been unemployed, never claimed unemployment at all ever. And, you know, if I have to mop the floors or go work at Walmart, I’ll just go do it. It’s not below me. It’s, you know, I love that quote of when Kennedy went to the NASA Space Center and he spoke to the janitor and he asked the janitor what he’s doing. He said, hey, I’m helping put a man on the moon. You know, it’s like you contribute to the overall mission with whatever skill set you have. And I think it’s really in that particular case, I didn’t just go back to being a technician because, you know, well, I was shocked because it was like, whoa, I had this job lined up at a big office that was and that was part of the problem. You know, I was on the technical side. I didn’t do any of the marketing or sales side for with her. And she’d come up from San Francisco, didn’t really realize, didn’t do the market research. And the fact that northern Nevada, similar to southern Nevada is there’s way more about who you know than what you know. And she didn’t know anybody. So she had real problems trying to find new business. And I was quite busy setting up secure encryption, setting up VPN tunnels, getting all that stuff done with a couple of interns that I had at the time. And then it just she was like, oh, not we don’t have any more money. And I had two properties at the time that I was working with. And well, I have to earn some money. And that was on a Thursday, I think. And I started with Art on a Monday, because he knew he could trust me 100% getting things done. And I still talk to him today, talk to him last week. Just one of the best guys for low voltage, any type of telephone systems. And now he’s he’s been kind of forced to transition into TCP IP systems and computers, computer controlled phone systems. And he’s going to guy who like I like him a lot because he just gets it done. You know, he works a lot. He’s been in Reno for all his life. So he knows, you know, business people who run car washes, who run storage places. So he’ll do the gate control codes. And now they’re all, oh, how do we tie this into my computer so that we can track who’s coming in and out and that type of stuff. He’s got some great guys on staff who I learned a lot from, and just fun people to work with. And now he he was happy for me when I found the Washoe County job, because he realized it like I’ve got a different skill set I can do these other things. But yeah, somebody wants me to build a server. I’ll build a server somebody wants to build a PC. Great. You want me to do routing and firewall? Yeah, I can do that.

Manuel: So it’s really just the it’s the work ethic. And then it’s also understanding that that’s not permanent. Right. And I think I’ve talked to a couple people in the past where they just, they get past that, or they get to a certain point where they feel, okay, hey, I had a setback again, outside of my control, whatever it might be. I’ll take whatever just to kind of go understanding that that’s not going to be where I stay, right? I will move my way back up. I will find something eventually, like you said, to where I feel my skill set is appropriate, but not necessarily think that, well, no, I’m going to wait until, you know, two, three months until I get what it is that I’m looking for. Sometimes again, you just, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do and move forward.

Alan: Yeah. And it’s, you know, I don’t know if it’s my, not as much my military background, but it was kind of like that through my childhood, you know, just do what you got to do. I say I started at 12 and a half with the local grocer. You know, I’d get up at 4:30am on a Saturday and we’d go to the local fruit market, the big market. We’d at that time, he’d buy all the fruit that was going to be thrown out, like the big boxes, oranges and stuff. And we’d take them all back to his shop. He had a shed at the back and I can remember exactly where it is. And we’d open up these boxes of rotten food and we are rotten vegetables and fruit and have to go through it and pick out any good ones, rinse them. And then we’d bag those up, which were kind of more profit for him. And then we’d, some of the places in Scotland, they have what they call tenements, which are like apartment blocks. And there’s a lot of older people who live in them. They’re kind of isolated. Away from, they don’t have a lot of services. So we’d load all these things in the van. And as I say, I was 12 and a half, 13 at the time. We’d drive into the estate and I’d run from the van up to the door, knock on the door, “Hey, would you like any vegetables or potatoes and stuff?” Okay, that’ll be X pounds at the time. And run back down, pack it, run back up with it again, deliver it. If they need to change, take the change back. So that’s what I do, like Thursday night, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, after school. And all day, the weekend, Saturday, Sunday, do that. So I was a really good runner. I used to be really good, but I got a two hour 42 marathon time to my name, but that was a long time ago. I couldn’t even run three, four miles now.

Manuel: You mentioned that you go in and you do your interview and eventually you started to meet at the state of Nevada. And then the question I had right before that is, you mentioned that they asked you, “What’s the plan?” So is that something you’re given ahead of time and you’ve kind of had to plan it out? Or is that a question in the interview and you’re kind of walking through that?

Alan: At the Washoe County School District, it was part of the interview was you got a 10 minute presentation on how you would establish the security program because there was no security program. There was no security office, nothing. Ed Gracia had managed to get some funding because he saw the need as a CIO. He saw that needed security. And after that, he did his CEH, he certified with the ethical hacker course and things like that. So he’s very smart. And he knew there was a need for this. So he was looking for somebody to build it. And I put a lot of thought into this is how I’m going to build it. And that’s what got me the year up. Years afterwards, I talked to him, he said, “It’s the second best presentation I’ve ever seen.” And I was like, “Oh, great, which is the best one?” I never quite got a clear answer on that one. Yeah, he’s good. He went, he moved from, he spent a lot of years at Washoe County and then went up to Tacoma in Washington, I think, and spent a long time up there as a CIO. And from there, when I was interviewing for the state CIO position, when it came up, there’s a group called NACIO, the National Association of State CIOs. And they have a thing called the NACIO Top 10, which these are the top 10 things that state CIOs should be looking for in the next 12 months. And they update it every year. It’s great, really, really good association. A lot of great people there. So before the interview, I researched it, found NACIO, downloaded those 10 things, and I mapped those two initiatives that were either already taking place, or I thought should take place at the state level for the state of Nevada. So when I interviewed for that, that was great because they hadn’t seen, I don’t think anybody, any competitors for that position had done that. So I got invited back for the second interview, which was supposed to be for 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and went for two and a half hours because I stepped through this whole program. I had it all prepared, you know, I had, I would say almost memorized, but I had all the touch points and I could speak to the touch points. And at the end of that interview, I remember it was a Tuesday night and the director of the administration department, who was the person who was hiring, I’d be reporting to, as I was walking out, she said, look, we’re going to offer you the job. So we’ll be in touch. So the next morning, the Wednesday morning, Governor Sisolak put out his hiring freeze. So didn’t hire anybody, but this was February. So I didn’t hear anything, not a peep, until August. And then so I was still working at Washoe County School District, doing my ISO job, you know, we’re dealing with COVID and all the rest of the stuff. So I get a call on a, like a Wednesday. Hey, this is the state, would you still be interested in a CIO job? Yeah. And they’re like, well, can you start Monday? I’m like, well, no, it’s not like I’m, you know, there’s some professionalism here. I need to at least give two weeks notice and hand things over and get it done. So that’s what happened. I think it was the first of September, around that time that I started with the state as state CIO. And I was asked to be in the office for the first six or seven months. And I was the only person in the building. I was commuting from Reno, and I’m having Zoom meetings with people and there’s nobody in the building. Nobody. So after that, I got to spend a little bit of time remote instead of driving all the time. And it’s, I’m not a political animal at all. I’m not, I just say it like it is. And that upsets a lot of people, because a lot of people at the state level don’t want to hear the truth. You know, there’s, there are state scoop articles, there’s various things about, you know, I don’t hide my opinion. I said what it was like. And it got me into a fair bit of trouble and people weren’t happy about it. And there, there are some other issues. There are some other things that happened at the state level that hopefully have now been corrected. But with software implementation, letting non-technology people run it. And there’s a major SAP implementation that, you know, and I’m not speaking out of turn here because it’s been reported a hundred million dollars. But again, we as Enterprise IT services and CIO at the time, we didn’t really have any input into that decision making process because it was being run by the project management office, OPM, no OPM, just the project management office. And it concerned me a lot. And there was some churn around that and I’ll leave it there. But I decided that I’m one of the, one of the big things that everybody asks me, what are your main things in life? It’s the first thing I always say is honesty and integrity. Integrity is the one thing that I will, you can only give it away. Nobody can take it from you. And I was told that my role was going to change. I’d say, well, this is not what you hired me for. So I’m not just going to sit here and accept that salary. I’m going to leave. So I left and a couple of weeks later, credit one bank here at, in Vegas called me and said, Hey, would you be interested in interviewing for the GRC, the vice president GRC, governance risk and compliance. So I flew down on a Thursday. Then I had three interviews and got offered the job on a Monday.

Manuel: You mentioned, you know, like the integrity and speaking, how it is. And then understanding it’s not only, it’s not necessarily what you know, but who you know, and also who knows you. So, you know, you mentioned, Hey, I speak, speak my mind. I speak the truth. I speak how it is. Again, not everybody wants to do that. Kind of looking back. And I saw this a couple of times. Is it that honesty and that integrity that also kind of helped you, you know, like you said, credit one bank reached out, things are floating around the news. Had it not been for the fact that you were so honest and so straightforward. And do you think that that turnaround would have been so quick? Because again, I think a lot of times people don’t understand and I understand that there’s components of a different role, but a lot of times your reputation precedes you. And I’ve always, that’s the one thing that I’ve tried to live by and kind of adhere to is because there are moments where, yes, in front of you, I can say, Hey, I do this, you know, this is what I take care of. Here’s what I’ve done. But if people decide to kind of fact check or check out your network, they’ll validate what you’re really telling, you know, if that’s the case.

Alan: Yeah, I think it’s more around how people perceive your reputation. Everybody’s going to perceive your reputation in a different way. And I have no control over that. Right? You’re going to perceive my reputations differently than anybody. Everybody’s going to look at it and go, Oh, I don’t think he should have said it that way. Like when I had the state scoop article, I had at least 11 or 12 other state CIOs message me or email me saying, Oh, man, I really wanted to say the same things about mine, but, you know, I’m political, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, Okay, this is just how I operate. And I’d only been in the state CIO job a couple of months. And I went to my first NACIO meeting. And I got voted on to the board at NACIO. Because again, I’m straight up. I’m like, I want to help. I want to do this. And I don’t just sit around on boards or any other, any other endeavor that I put my time into, you know, like with a, the Cyroot Academy. I’m on the board at Cyroot Aademy. But I really, I really want to help. I try to reach out to people and make things tech. There are a lot of people who get board member positions and think, Oh, it’s just the name. Yeah, I’m just on the board. So I can put that on my resume or put it in my experience. What do you mean? I have to turn up to meetings. You know, I have to make decisions. Like, Oh, yeah, that’s, that’s what we’re trying to get your experience to do. So that’s me. I’m, I won’t say I’m gung ho at it. But I try and give my honest best, like I’m vice president of the local chapter of society of information management or SIM. Bob Leek who’s the CIO for Clark County is the president. And I try and help out with everything I can. You know, I write name badges, I send emails, I follow up by trying push these things through. You know, we’ve gone from 20 something members this time last year to over 70 members, but 75 members now. And a lot of that that’s been through Bob’s leadership. And but there’s a board. And there are people who continually want to make action there. And that makes a difference. So that that’s how I see from the honest integrity thing is just if you say you’re going to do it, do it. And do it to your best ability. And my dad always told me, I said, if you’re going to do the job, make sure you do it to the best of your ability.

Manuel: And similar to you, to the best of the ability. And then, you know, the one thing my dad always said is to the best of your ability, even if nobody’s watching. Right. And that was the big thing because, you know, he owned a masonry company for years. Right. So I remember going through and I was like, ah, what does it matter? And, you know, there’s a lot of times that I was younger. So similar to you, I was probably like 10, 11 years old when I started work for him. And you’re young, and I would cut corners. And he would come back later and see like, you cut corners. And no, I didn’t. You did. I can see it in the work. Right. So he was one of those guys and to this day, it still amazes me. Like I can sit somewhere and he’s like, oh, it’s 40 feet or 42 feet from here. And I’m like, no, I’d grab a measuring tape. And over time, I’ve seen it now because I drive around the city and I know now what quality workmanship looks like. So I can drive by, look at a wall, I said, okay, I see what they didn’t do here. Hey, they just kind of threw this up quickly. It’s not level. And my wife’s like, how do you see that? And again, just that repeated process of doing it right. Even if nobody’s paying attention, even if your boss isn’t there, you know, there’s something behind that.

Alan: And my reply would be a question is, who’s the only person you respect to judge your quality?

Manuel: Probably myself.

Alan: That’s the answer.

Manuel: Yeah.

Alan: So from an integrity standpoint, I do it to the level that I want to do it. And that’s when I think it’s good. This goes with my website design as well as some of my cabling sometimes it may not always look pretty, but it’s going to work. Right. So I’m a big function over form guy. But sometime the form feeds the function. I had a couple of gentlemen I worked with in Reno on website design, Mike and Jimmy, great guys. And Mike would always talk about white space and the use of white space. I’m like, no, we can put some information in there. It’s like, no, no, understand. So again, like the great book that I mentioned earlier, it talks about a cognitive diversity. And it talks about having blind spots that you don’t even know about. And that’s why when I think about data, and finding data, this ball, internet, whatever you want to call it, technology, I look at it from this direction. You look at it from this direction. Other people look at it from their own direction. And what I’ve always tried to do is move myself around to see it from your perspective, because that gives me new perspective. And I’ve never even thought about that. You know, so in diversity, me is not a gender thing. It’s not like that. It’s diversity of thought. You know, because there are people who everybody thinks differently from me. Right. But you know, when you when I get a musician looks at a problem totally different from me, a car mechanic looks at it totally differently. So I’m trying to build that and take those diverse thought processes and problem solving routes and synthesize them into something that is better than just me. Better than just me make it more than just the sum of the parts. Because that’s where I think as humans, we have the word intelligence, but it’s been bastardized. So it’s like we have that ability to make those cognitive jumps that I don’t think machines machines can learn patterns and look at patterns and maybe find things that as humans were not good at finding. I was at the Tech Alley mixer last Thursday. Yeah. In Henderson. And one of the great ladies who spoke was a physician or is a physician, trauma surgeon, etc. And one of the points she brought up was, you know, the way that they’re using machine learning or AI to recognize patterns for breast cancer, for instance, or any other type of cancer. And the fact that percentage wise, the machines are recognizing it more than humans. Okay, machines say they don’t make mistakes, but machine mistake is called hallucination. Humans make mistakes. I think we have to learn to coexist with the tool and respect for respect for that’s what it is. It’s a tool. Right. And we need to fact check it. The same as we would, we should be fact checking humans. You know, if we take people’s experts’ opinion at face, I’m not a mathematician, so I couldn’t tell a good mathematician from a bad mathematician, or a statistician, or a geologist, or a gynecologist. It’s like, I couldn’t tell because that’s not my area of expertise. I have to take whatever they say to me as prima facie, because there’s a certain amount of societal trust in that. And how do you build that societal trust through, you know, certifications, hey, people, doctors go to medical school for all this time, and they get, you know, awarded a MD or whatever happens to be, and then the specialist stuff that they do afterwards. So I trust them to be able to, same as my mechanic, work on my Honda car, because he’s got a Honda certified tech there. And in technology, I think that that’s sometimes not adhered to as much. But we can get in a whole conversation about the educational establishment. If we want to go that way, because I was exposed to Washoe County School District, that’s supposed to a little bit Clark County School District. And from what I’ve seen with students, I think that it needs a major shake up.

Manuel: At some point, I would, I would like to have come back and dig into more topics, especially like just the way that you think, you know, a lot of the experiences that you’ve had, you know, just understanding, I mean, I sit here and I’m just like, wow, this is this is amazing, right? Like, you know, being off camera, like I’m making faces, because, you know, I’m trying to control like my facial expression, like, oh, wow, like, I didn’t think about that. Or that’s a good way to, to kind of explain something. So I definitely would like to, you know, at some point in the future, bring you back and continue that conversation. But as we wrap this one up, is there anything that you want to anything either I haven’t asked you something that you want to bring up, you know, to kind of wrap up the conversation? I really, instead of me asking you a question, I just want to kind of give you an open forum to kind of leave a parting thought or.

Alan: A lot of things seem trite where, oh, mentorship, networking, yeah, they’re all important. Anybody who is watching this, who’s looking to get into technology slash cyber, okay, get a good base set of knowledge. And easiest way to get that is get into a help desk position, or join a small local computer store, where you’re dealing with customers. All right, and you’re dealing with multiple different problems. So you have to build that critical thinking skill set. Take courses on critical thinking, they’re available. You know, Udemy, Khan Academy, Harvard, Yale, they all have free courses. Some of the free courses are limited in depth, but it’s a great place to start. And then map out, map out your future a little bit, where do you want to go? And how do I get there? You know, we call it gap analysis. This is where we’re at right now. This is where we want to go to. Here’s the gap. How do we solve the gap and cross the gap? Don’t expect you’re just going to walk into a six figure job. Not going to happen. Just not don’t believe the marketers don’t believe the recruiters don’t believe any of that bulls*** I’m really trying to stop from swearing because in the last one, there was lots of beeps. And I’m trying not to get beeped out here. Because I’m really passionate about it from, okay, how do we get people into the industry? You know, we should be inviting everybody into the industry and treating everybody equally from a perspective of, alright, what are your strengths? And how do we apply your strengths best to solving the industry challenges that we have? You have to be passionate about what you do and enjoy it. You should not be waking up in the morning going, oh, no, I really don’t want to do this. If that’s the case, figure out how to change it. There are so many specialties you can go into. I am not a programmer. I have several people who will attest to that. But I did write a web app last week, which was kind of cool with Gemini. I started off asking for, give me 500 basic cybersecurity questions and answers. I was like, hmm, that would be cool if it was in flashcards. I’m like, okay, so let’s write a web app that makes this happen. And then I learned how to, well, I’ve installed Python before, but I had to reinstall Python and start a web server so I could put it up and view it. So I ended up with this little app. That I published on GitHub. And it’s flashcards with 500 different questions and answers. And you can randomize it and make changes to it. So I didn’t have to know how to write the HTML in the style sheets or do the JSON files because Gemini did them for me. What I did was supplied it with the data and said, oh, change the colors, which don’t look very good because I’m still colorblind. But that’s the type of advantages you can get using the technology tool, using the electric screwdriver to get the job done. And one piece of advice and get is try and put money aside for training. Because if you don’t do that on a regular basis, then when it comes to get training, you’re not going to be able to afford it. And that’s one of one of the big reasons that Asal wanted to start the nonprofit with the Cyroot Academy. She saw a lot of people who were in training and then dropped out because they couldn’t afford it. You know, something happened. If you if you think that your employer is going to provide training for you for free, maybe rethink that a little bit. And if you do want your employer to work with you on training, go to them with a solution, not a problem, not a challenge. You know, go with the course, go with the trends, how much is going to cost for transport go with how much it’s going to cost for food and hotel or if it’s going to be virtual. And hey, if I’m going to be away for this time doing a virtual course, I’ve already asked people to stand in for me. So then all your boss has to say is yes.

Manuel: Do a lot of that heavy lifting.

Alan: Do the legwork, do the legwork here, just all you got to do say yes, I’ve taken care of all the challenges around this. And more than likely, you’ll get a yes because you’ve prepared. Preparation is a huge thing. There’s seven P’s, Prior Planning and Preparation Prevent Piss Poor Performance. I’m not sure if you have to bleep that P or not.

Manuel: (Laughter) No, and I agree. And I think that’s why, you know, with you working at Cyroot with Asal’s foundation and you know, kind of what kind of connected us as well is trying to kind of give back and help out. Right. I know I’ve benefited from other people. I’ve benefited from similar to you kind of putting in my own, you know, hard work. And again, nothing’s going to replace that. But if there are opportunities, if there’s information that we can kind of pass on to kind of help you along that way. And again, you’re still going to make mistakes. There’s still going to be setbacks, but be a little bit more prepared for them. I think is kind of the biggest thing that I’m trying to accomplish with this and then, you know, kind of working and partnering with Asal as well is, you know, how do we kind of give back? Like I’ve taken so much that now I’m at the point where like, how do I got to give back?

Alan: Yeah, I mean, I’ve received so much. I don’t feel like I’ve taken it. And so when you receive that, it’s like, and you synthesize it and you say, okay, what do I think about this and how can I reach back out? And that’s also what I’m trying to do, not only with the podcast here, but with the Academy is in reaching out like yesterday, volunteering for CCSD to try and help the kids, because sometimes they don’t have anybody to talk to. And it’s like, that could make the could be the one thing that made a difference. There was one student yesterday who is a bat, he wants to be a basketball coach and playing basketball. And just off the cuff, he’s like, yeah, this university in Italy, want me to go play basketball and coach basketball there. And I was like, you’re not doing it. Dude, just drop everything and go. Because if they, if he can get the experience of living and working in another country, that’s massive. You know, and huge for your thought process and how you see others. There’s a, I said this yesterday to somebody, but there’s a famous Scottish poet, Robert Burns, and one of his poems is To a Louse. And part of it is to see yourselves as others see us. So how do other people see you? And that’s really difficult for us to know as an individual, because it’s not like looking in the mirror. Everybody has their own set of filters, if you want, if you want to use a social media term, a whole set of filters and experiences that they view your actions through, you’re never going to replicate that. So learning how other people see you is a big part of growing up.

Manuel: Well, this has been a fantastic conversation. And like I said, I’m excited for a part two and just kind of continue this. And, you know, like I mentioned, to Asal and maybe what I’ll probably do is bring you on around that same time as I want to give that time to kind of grow and at some point bring back and, you know, follow on and the learning’s there and then just any other things, any other topics that we might not have covered today.

Alan: Yeah, I think there’s tons of area of technology that I’d like to, and I’m not espousing on it, but just give my opinion, answer the questions. If it helps somebody, that that’s all that matters. You know, and if anybody has questions that they want to direct to me, I’m more than happy to take the time to answer them.

Manuel: Well, again, I appreciate it. And for everybody out there watching and listening, again, thank you for taking the time to, you know, kind of listen to these experiences. And, you know, my ultimate hope is that you are able to take out, you know, some valuable information from this to be able to help you and, you know, inspire you or just, you know, again, provide a sounding board or relate with somebody. So thank you for listening and remember to plug in and download the knowledge.