5TT 32 | Women In Tech

 

Diversity of thought breeds innovation. For many tech companies, it may not be unheard of that they’re mostly composed of a male workforce. Carrie Goetz defies the statistics by being one of the most successful women in tech. Carrie is the Principal and CTO of StrategITcom, a company covering a range of services from strategic planning to design and project implementation, technical writing, or just some help through a procurement cycle. She chats with host Carrie Charles on the show today to share her journey, the current state of women in tech, and why now is the perfect time for them. They also touch on mentorship, sponsorship, and diversity.

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Why Now Is The Perfect Time For Women In Tech With Carrie Goetz

I am excited to have with me our special guest, Carrie Goetz. Carrie is the Principal and CTO of StrategITcom. She personifies nearly 40 years of global experience designing, running and auditing data centers, IT departments, and intelligent buildings. She’s an international keynote speaker and has published in 69 countries in over 250 publications. She also holds an honorary doctorate in Mission Critical Operations and a second degree Master Infrastructure Mason with over 40 certifications. She’s on the WIMCO National Education Committee and a long-time participant in 7×24 Exchange, AFCOM, and Data Center Institute board of advisors, Mission Critical Advisory Board, Women in Data Centers, CNET Technical Curriculum Advisory Board, Vice Chairwoman and Liaison for STEM for AATCU, and a member of BICSI and CTO for Joint Force Solutions.

She champions STEM education through outreach projects, and she has an incredible podcast that you all should listen to. She fosters Women in Tech. StrategITcom is founded with a charter to assure that 50% of employees are women and 50% of all partner referrals will go to women or diversely-owned enterprises. She also holds one telecommunications patent. She was named in The Top 10 Most Influential Women in Technology in 2020 by Analytics Insight, Network Computing Inspiration Awards finalist 2020, and Comptia Women in Leadership Spotlight finalist. Carrie, thank you for being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

I am excited for everyone to hear about your journey. How did you get from where you were to where you are now?

I’ve always been one of these people that’s not scared. I love tech. I love that things change. I love trying new things. I love learning new things. It was a progression. I started in architecture and teaching Computer Aided Engineering in junior college. As CAD started to come along, I started writing programs for CAD, and then I learned a couple of other programming languages. They then had a project to tie together some of the campuses. That’s when networking was in its infancy. We were getting away from Sneakernet and running things around on floppy drives. I wasn’t scared that a computer chip my arm off up to the elbow, they asked if I would take that on and so I did. I started doing some consulting and ended up starting some networking division at a couple of consulting firms. I ran some IT departments for awhile and then consulting again. I worked for a manufacturer then I worked for a distributor and now I own my own company. I’m one of those few people that’s done everything in tech. A lot of people pick one path and stick with it. I’ve done all of them.

That’s what makes you an expert. You can relate to every single woman and person in tech. I want to talk a little bit about the current state of women in tech, maybe some statistics. Where are we?

Women in tech, we have a way to go to diversely. Although women are half the population. Sixty-seven percent of women don’t just leave their job, they leave tech entirely, which is deplorable. There have been lots of reasons cited for that. Some are harassment and some they don’t feel well. For years we’ve done a bad job of using tech to solve some of those problems. Normally, if somebody has to drop out in a relationship and become a caregiver, it’s usually the woman because she makes less money. Society-wise, women tend to be the caregivers more often than not. We have ways to go in embracing that. There are a lot of problems too.

If you look at job hunting, for instance, 85% of jobs are filled through networking. Who do we network with? We network with the guys we played golf with, all that stuff. We’ve got to the point where these applicant tracking systems, you have to tick a little box. You could find all stuff on the internet about how to trick those systems and get to an interview. Hide all the keywords and write your resume, rewrite your resume using those keywords for every job you apply for. All those things that are counterintuitive. You then have people that are career coaches that tell women, “Use your initials because that way they can’t tell you’re a woman.” If you’re a company and you’re trying to solve the women in tech problem and make your company more diverse, that’s counterintuitive.


There's room for everybody in tech; there are a million different jobs.
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AI is one thing and it carries the bias of the coders. We know that it’s been proven. AI does some things but if we’re trying to solve it, AI can’t do that critical thinking. We’ve got to change that behavior and model that. You’ve got companies like JPMorgan Chase who won’t take a company public at all unless they have women representation on the board. They’ve proven that there’s much more financially solvent and they grow much faster. It’s starting to come to light and some companies do a good job of doing that. A lot of companies say they’re going to try to do that, but when it gets to be a little difficult then it was too hard. I think we’ve got ways to go to yet.

I tend to agree with you. I’ve heard this over and over again but I feel like we need to say it again, that women and men are different in what jobs they will apply for based on what percentage of the skills that they have on the job description. Can you talk about that a little bit?

That’s true. There’s been study after study that says women will only apply to a job if they feel that they’re close to 100% qualified. Men will apply when they’re about 60% qualified. A lot of job’s requirement is a four-year degree. It doesn’t matter what it’s in. It could be in Russian studies or whatever, but they want a four-year degree. A lot of women, if they have to drop out and become a caregiver, they don’t have the four-year degree but they have four years of experience. As an employer, I always thought that was more valuable anyway because they were in the trenches. They did the trial by fire and there’s also no diversity if everybody is trained the exact same way.

We know in tech that curriculum does not keep up with tech at all. Tech moves so fast that even people with a four-year degree end up having to go get certified or do a lot of on-the-job training. There are lots of ways to get people where they’re going and a four-year degree is one thing. Only 34% of men and 35% of women in the United States have a four-year degree. We’re trying to fill every single position with about 35% of the population and that’s not going to happen. Companies like Amazon that are now upskilling employees, and Apple who’s only about 50% of their employees even have four-year degree because they go on skills-based hiring. That’s where we need to get to because there’s room for everybody in tech. There are a million different jobs. That’s what my podcast is about. It’s introducing people to all of the different jobs from construction all the way through to the cloud.

What’s the name of your podcast?

It’s Careers for Women, Trades and Veterans in Tech. We’ve been talking about the women issue and there’s a lot. We’ve gotten away from trades in this country but without trades, none of us have a job because nothing would be built. There’s room for everybody and a lot of the trade schools prepare people for that base of getting a good job. In some cases, even more like you can go in New York and apprentice for an electrician. You get out of the apprenticeship and you’re making six figures a year and you have zero college debt. We have to get back to doing those trades. The other one is veterans. There are men and women veterans and even veterans’ spouses. I’m a veteran liaison for infrastructure masons. They work with the veterans and their spouses to get them skilled. They have parallel skills and amazing discipline that fit right into a ton of what we do in tech.

Those are the three things that I picked, but it is an outreach because for kids, by the time they’re 6 or 7, they usually decide what they want to be when they grow up. They decide that based on what they see. As kids go through junior high school, high school, and even into college, if they don’t have a frame of reference for those careers and they don’t see those careers, they’re never going to see themselves in them. If they don’t see themselves represented in the board of a company, we know now that a lot of these Gen Z, Gen Xers won’t even apply to those jobs because they don’t see themselves in the top positions and that’s where they want to go.

I seem to fit into every category you’ve mentioned. I don’t have a four-year college degree and I truly believe in education. I’m self-educated. I have many certifications. I’ve got an enormous amount of experience, but I believe with my heart and soul that we need to shift this mindset that a four-year degree is required for every job. I’m also a veteran as well in the Marine Corps. The skills translate well to tech, to telecom, and many of these skillsets that we’re talking about. I believe the people are there. What’s broken that these people, the women, the veterans, the minorities, the diversity are not getting into these companies to move the needle?

5TT 32 | Women In Tech

Women In Tech: Studies show that women will only apply to a job if they feel that they’re close to 100% qualified, while men will apply when they feel they’re about 60% qualified.

 

Part of it is tech has always been behind the scenes. People treat it like lights. When you flip a switch, it’s there and people know the technology exists. There’s a misnomer that you have to write code to be in tech. For a lot of people, that’s sort of intimidating or that you have to be good at math to be in tech when honestly, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Maybe the data center industry and even 5G when you start talking about broadband communications, you’ve got people that build towers, you’ve got all of the backhaul communications, you’ve got cable plant, you’ve got electricians, you’ve got all the equipment. There are a million things that you can do. We need to do a better job of making those skills available.

We also need to make sure that trade schools or two-year junior colleges are certainly a big part of that equation. Even in college, the curriculum has to encompass what the industry has. It’s on all of us to push that message forward to the next generation because if they don’t see those jobs, they don’t know those jobs exist. I wrote this article called The Great Talent “Suck”. It talks about the big data center cities, that’s where the curriculum is because that’s where the job demand is. With edge compute, 5G, and the digital divide, those jobs are going to be in every little small town, rural healthcare, precision agriculture. They have a tractor now that’s like a Roomba that will go out and weed your fields for you. You don’t even have to sit in it.

All of these things are getting to be part of this equation and these jobs are going to be everywhere. We have to make them more accessible and we have to change HR policies. I’ll give you a good example. One of the girls that I mentor had a CRM skill and she’d done a lot in Oracle. They wanted a different CRM package and she never got past the HR person because she couldn’t tick that one box. One CRM package is similar to another CRM package but they all do the same stuff. A lot of these HR people are not technical recruiters. They don’t understand the technology and somebody in technology needs to be able to fill and fit and find those parallel skills. Some companies do a great job of that. The girl that runs the safety programs for Google came out of the mining industry. Some brilliant person decided what a great parallel skill to look at safety people like mining is a hazardous area. If you can control safety there, you can control safety in the construction site of a data center. We have to start not thinking outside the box but we have to think in a different box.

With AI, with automation, and with everyone moving toward becoming more efficient, this concerns me of what you said about the recruiting process in companies because companies received thousands of resumes. The goal is to automate and find ways to increase efficiency. This problem you’re talking about is going to get worse and not better. We’re not on a path to humanize the recruiting process. We’re on a path to automate it. This is going to heavily affect the future. This problem’s going to get worse in other words. Are there any ideas or solutions around this area on how to bring that human element or not miss some of these people that are skilled and can do the job, but they’re not being picked up by the software?

It takes somebody to start reading resumes again. We have to redefine keywords. We can’t be looking for the exact keywords in a job description. The word infrastructure is a good example. If we look for somebody with infrastructure experience that could be networking infrastructure, it could be physical infrastructure, and it could be power and cooling. It means something different to everybody that uses that word. We have to do a much better job of looking for skills that can be applicable and understanding even if you have somebody with the exact skills from another company, they’re probably not going to do it the way you want anyway. You’re probably still going to have to train them.

We have to start reaching across the aisle. We have to do more work with junior college programs and college programs and making sure that curriculum is providing the skills that we need for people. We have to get past this letting a machine do everything for us. We have to reinvent the way these applicant tracking systems are working because it’s clearly not working now. Remote work is another big thing. Nobody wanted to allow anybody to work remotely. We’ve proven that could work. A lot of companies are going to want people to come back certainly because it’s the way their company operates. The work landscape is going to change. Even the way college kids are learning now, I don’t think that college kids are going to demand a classroom experience all the time. College kids now, especially this younger generation, are not going to want to learn stuff that’s not applicable to what they’re doing. The whole learning process is going to change. We’re in a digital shift right here. It takes having sponsors and even cultivators to make these things happen just to be able to get some of those people in the industry.

I want to talk a little bit more about the trades. I think that this is a huge answer. The trades traditionally have not been cool. Parents don’t raise their children encouraging them to go into the trades. Many times they’ll say, “You don’t want to end up like Jimmy, look at him over here.” I’m not blaming or saying that it’s any one particular responsibility. I do believe that education is important. What do we do here? How do we make the trades cool again and support the trades? What are some solutions here?

I have this #HireThePersonNotThePaper. I think that’s important. If you think about it, somebody that graduates in medical school with LDS is still called a doctor. That doesn’t mean he’s the best. The same thing happens, not everybody learns the same way. Some people don’t learn well in a college environment. Some people are horrible at taking a test, but they’re amazing with hands-on stuff or they like solving puzzles, which is great for a coder. Two years of something applicable to what you want to do is amazing. With the two-year curriculum, you’re getting out of school with a lot less debt. One backlash from this is in IT, the average person stays on the job eighteen months. It costs at least $100,000 every time you turn an employee. We have to get to the point where we’re not saddling kids coming into the workplace with so much debt that there is no loyalty. After you’ve worked someplace for a year or two, you’re worth a lot more in the marketplace and companies give a 3% token raise. You’re incentivizing your people to leave.


Many people think that you have to be good at math to be in tech when honestly, that couldn't be farther from the truth.
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It’s not just money. There are a lot of things involved. When I started consulting, that’s where a lot of these certifications came from because you needed them for this contract or this whatever. You go and you’d get the certification and then everybody was happy. After you get 3 or 4 of those certifications, you’re worth about $20,000 more a year in the workplace, but your company gives you a little bit so it’s an easy way to go. The same thing’s happening with these kids that have $100,000 worth of college. First off, nobody should be encouraging them to take out debt that they can’t repay. That’s horrible. That’s a bad practice for later in life. If they have that debt and another company offers them that extra $10,000, they’re blowing-out of there fast.

We have to look at not just how we pay our people and we should advertise pay scales for a job. That takes away the male-female thing. Everybody gets paid equally. We know what the pay is, what that range is, and it’s on that scale. That takes away a whole lot of that, “I have to negotiate my worth with this company,” because we already know what that is. We need to normalize parental leave. A friend of mine, Nancy Novak, she was on my podcast and was talking about this. If it’s the same leave for a man and a woman when they have a child, people aren’t worried about hiring the woman and her getting pregnant and having to take off for six weeks because everybody takes off six weeks.

Back to the point about trade schools, we have to take that stigma away that they’re not that great. That’s one area that companies have a lot more ability to be nimble because trade schools love having company sponsors, or junior colleges for that matter. The two-year universities love having company sponsors. They can adjust their curriculum a little bit easier than some of the four-year folks. We have to look at our kids and understand, are they going to want to graduate with a four-year degree of LDS? Are they going to want to do something that is applicable to their vocation and go for two years with little debt and then start working towards it?

There are a lot of companies that say that they’ll pay for your college education as part of the employee benefits, but they only hire people with a four-year degree that is such lip service. That’s not a tangible benefit. We have to start like that #ValueThePersonNotThePaper and look at what that person brings to the equation. I would rather have somebody with four years’ experience than a four-year degree because they’ve been in the trenches, they’ve sorted it out, and they’ve shuffled through it. It brings a diversity of thought especially to problem-solving that you’re not going to find anywhere else.

This reminds me of the remote workforce issue. I’ve had my staffing company now for a few years. We’ve been telling hiring managers, “Can this be a remote role? Can they maybe possibly be a hybrid role remote?” Hiring managers and leaders were nervous. There was a lot of fear around it. We then got shoved into and forced it to be here. Many leaders are looking at it and saying, “This is working.” I might keep some of this around. I feel like this is similar to this college degree conversation and it’s starting to happen more and more. I was interviewed for an article about this because I don’t personally have the four-year degree. I believe that leaders want to make this step. They think that they see the value and understand it. There’s still this thing inside them that’s wired to look for, appreciate, and value a college degree. If you’ve got two people in front of you and one has and one doesn’t, that leader may be biased to choose the one who doesn’t. This needs to be a mindset shift.

If you’re going to discriminate a woman or a man for that matter that has to drop out and take care of their family, or you’re going to discriminate against somebody who couldn’t get the student loan to finish their degree, then you’ve taken all the diversity out of your company. It’s horrible disservice, and a lot of companies list that four-year degree as a requirement but they’ll waive it for the right person. Why list it to start with? Let people show you if they have a degree. Let them show you if they have that experience, but stop making it a job requirement. I will tell you, based on study after study, women will not apply to that job if they don’t have that degree.

There’s another side to that too. There are a lot of schools that either lost accreditation or a lot of religious schools that didn’t go the accreditation route because they would have to drop their religious requirements. It doesn’t mean the person doesn’t have the degree. It means that they didn’t have the right credits to be accredited within that body. Those aren’t counted either because they’re not accredited degrees. Schools that went out of business years ago, they don’t fall up on this list of accredited degrees. We’ve got to get away from that being the number one job requirement. It’s just so counterproductive to what we’re trying to do. We have to look at the skills people bring to the table.

I want to go back to diversity. Why is this conversation important? Why should we even be talking about this? Why do we hear about it every time we open our computers or a magazine? Why is diversity important? Why do women need to be represented 50/50? Why does it matter?

5TT 32 | Women In Tech

Women In Tech: Tech moves so fast that even people with a four-year degree end up having to get certified or do a lot of on-the-job training.

 

First off, we’re half the population. There’s that. I shared this piece on LinkedIn about diversity. It was the JP Morgan Chase article. They wouldn’t take a company public unless they had a woman on the board. This man wrote this thing, “Hire the best skilled person, let diversity fall where it lies. Why do you even care about diversity?” I answered back. I said, “Are you married?” He responded, “Yes.” I said, “Have you ever lost your car keys and complained to your wife, and she walked right up to you and handed them to you?” That’s what diversity buys you. It’s a different thought process. Women are better multitaskers than men as a whole. Women think differently. We’re wired differently. There’s a caregiver’s nature to us that’s innate. It’s not to say that men don’t but we think differently and we can get to the same solution differently. When that problem is out there, that’s what diversity of thought brings you. Who’s going to know exactly where you left the keys. Who’s going to be scratching their head looking for the keys? Those roles might reverse. The whole point is that’s what diversity brings you. It brings you that thought.

AI is a great example. What if AI only thinks like men because there are not enough women writing code? We’re in trouble. We have to get out of that mindset that there’s a single way of thinking. The only way to do that is to bring some of that diversity. Even diversity young kid to old kid. Kids don’t learn like we do. They’re rapid-paced. I want to learn this in little pieces. I need to know exactly what I’m supposed to know and what my objectives are for this little piece. It’s not like you have to suck up to us because we’ve been in this job for many years. It doesn’t work that way because everything that we do is addressing all of those people. Technology has to address everybody that uses it. You’re not going to be able to address those people if you don’t know how they think.

Diversity of thought breeds innovation. If companies want to innovate, if companies want to get ahead, they’re going to be smart. They’re going to be a champion for diversity. Let’s talk about sponsorship and mentorship. I’m excited about this topic with you. I have a keynote and then I’m on a webinar. It’s all based on mentorship. I’m going to another event where I’m speaking on mentorship. This is becoming a hot topic which I’m excited about. There was an article I read that you wrote, “Be a sponsor, not just a mentor.” I want to know in your opinion, what’s the difference between a sponsor and a mentor?

A mentor is somebody that’s going to help you in your career, help you figure out work ethics, things that you do for your job and for your career. A sponsor will fly your flag and they will bring your name up when you’re not in the room. They will put your name forward and go one step above and beyond. I also add a cultivator to that. A cultivator is important. Cultivators are the ones that see potential in somebody young and can push forward and turn that relationship into a mentor relationship in some cases, but push that person on and say, “I see a light in you that I think could work. I know that you’re having a hard time but let me work through this with you.” You then become a mentor, and then you become their sponsor. It’s doing that grassroots reaching up, pulling them up and start to cultivate them as talent. You have to do that at a young age.

I’ll give you a good example. One of the ladies that I know and work, there was a girl that did a temporary internship with them and the role got eliminated because of the virus. She reached out to her entire network of women and say, “This girl is amazing. She’s not in tech. She’s in accounting. She doesn’t like accounting. She can’t afford to go back to school. She lost her scholarship. College isn’t an avenue. What can we do to help her?” That’s a cultivator. Seeing that light that this is amazing young woman reaching out. Seeing what people can do to help her out, and then growing that into something where she’s now on a path with a lot of women looking after her. It takes a village thing to get her to that level.

All of these women that are working with her, we all mentor her a little bit, but at some point, somebody’s going to be a sponsor, raise their hand and say, “You need to talk to this girl.” This is not what you’re looking at but you need to talk to this girl. If we go back to that 85% of all jobs are filled through networking, that’s where sponsorship becomes important. Somebody that can say, “You need to consider this person.” We take the machine out of the equation and we say, “This person is dynamite. We’ve got to find a place for this person.”

In our company, the majority of our roles are also filled through networking and people that we know. That’s where we are a cultivator for every one of our candidates. Let’s look at this from the viewpoint of a mentor and the viewpoint of a mentee. Let’s take leaders, for example. If there are leaders reading this and they’re thinking, “Do I need to start a mentorship program in my company? Do I need to assign mentors?” What’s the first step or the first few steps for leaders to make this happen in their companies?

A program is good. It’s nice to have it as an official program. It shows your employees that you’re taking the initiative to grow what they’re doing. I’ve got different mentees through different organizations. Some of them have a formal process and you need to follow this and this. Although I will say more often than not it goes way off that chart, which is a good thing. Having that formal program shows your employees that you’re taking an interest in where they’re going in the company. It’s a two -way street though. Everybody that I have ever mentored, I learned just as much from them if not more than they learn from me. I learned different ways of thought and the different ways people think and that kind of stuff, which is equally important, but it has to be a comfortable relationship.


Hire the person, not the paper.
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I was a keynote at a WIMCO event in Dallas. This man stood up and said, “Why would I want a mentee that’s a female with the #MeToo Movement going on?” I thought, “How shallow is that? Have your meetings at a restaurant. What are you saying to your mentees that you’re not worried about that?” I do think it’s a matter of matching the right people. I think that mentees will challenge mentors and mentors should challenge mentees. If you’re a woman in tech, it doesn’t mean you have to have a female mentor. You could have a male mentor. It could be whatever arrangement works. It could be somebody from a completely different department that’s helping you navigate company structure. A lot of these big companies can be political and sometimes that’s a difficult environment, especially for people that don’t like drama.

Whether it’s formal or not, if you’re trying to navigate your way through things, there are a million places you can reach out and find a mentor. You can do it through professional organizations. You can do it on LinkedIn as far as that goes. You can do it through church. You can do it through family members and people that you know. There are a lot of ways to make that happen. Mentors are not mind-readers either. As a mentee, you have to be able to articulate some things and then out of that conversations come and that will lead to other things.

You said that there are many companies out there that want to hire more women, but when it gets a bit difficult, they cave and they go back to the same old. I want to drive this point home because leaders have a comfort zone and they also have a lot of pressure to hire. It’s hard to be a champion for diversity and maintain diversity. What are some solutions here? How do we support leaders to get out of their comfort zone and keep going even when it’s hard to make sure that they are committed to diversity?

It has to start at the top. If you want to attract women and diverse people, you have to do things like be willing to pay a relocation fee, be able to let people work remotely, be able to let a woman work from home when her kid is sick. Even if it’s a hybrid role, we have to be able to use tech to its advantage to allow some of those things to happen organically. We also have to start surrounding ourselves with people that are outside of our comfort zone. When we talk about these networking conversations, we have to be more active. For instance, in a community that surrounds what we do that has men and women at the table. We have to listen. We have to make sure that all voices are heard and that the women at the table are heard.

I had a guy that worked for me one time that would never say anything in a staff meeting because he was hard at hearing. He was conscious about his speech, great employee, and one of the best coders on the planet. I said, “Start giving me your questions and I’ll ask them for you because that’s how you’re going to be heard. I need you to be heard because your input is valuable.” We have to start making some of those conversations happen. If you’re at a local networking event, seek out the women in the room. What are you doing? There is so much that’s parallel that can work, but as humans, we as a whole don’t like to get outside of our comfort zone anyway.

It has to start top-down and it’s got to be not lip service. Somebody is going to have to pull some applications and figure out if we want to hire 50% women or whatever that is, somebody is going to have to look and make sure they’re women. I know there are people that say that’s reverse discrimination but that’s the only way to solve this problem. We’re not going to solve it by the status quo. We’re not going to solve it by hiring the same people all the time. We’re not going to solve it by machines trying to tick boxes in keynote fields because there are too many things that are parallel. Some human is going to have to think that through to figure out what those relationships are.

Great leaders get out of their comfort zone and they take a stand.

The best leaders surround themselves with brilliant people and challenge them and give the support to do what they want, and sit back and watch them shine. People will amaze you if you give them that opportunity.

5TT 32 | Women In Tech

Women In Tech: We have to start surrounding ourselves with people that are outside of our comfort zone.

 

Carrie, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show. Where can we reach you?

You can go to LinkedIn. It’s @CarrieGoetz. StrategITcom.com is out there. You can reach me there. I’m accessible. I’m around. You can catch me on Twitter @CarrieJGoetz. Anywhere I’m happy to connect.

The name of your podcast again, please.

Careers for Women, Trades and Veterans in Tech.

Carrie, thanks for being on the show. This was an Amazing episode. I’d like to do this again someday.

We will and you’ll have to come do mine too.

You got it. Take care.

Take care.

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About Carrie Goetz

5TT 32 | Women In TechIT Executive, Global Keynote Speaker, D.MCO, RCDD, NTS, CNID, AWS CCP, CSM, PSP, Podcaster.

An executive with P&L for multi-million dollar annual budgets delivering on-time projects within financial parameters while driving sustainable growth.

Globally consult with end-users, consultants, and integrators creating sustainable data center and intelligent building designs. I provide frugal yet agile solutions with a mind to do it right once, at the speed of business.

Launched startup CTOaaS fractional technology services covering smart cities, technology debt assessments, and strategic planning providing services from cabling to the cloud.

Launched subagent services for telecommunications, networking, point-of-sale, barcode, physical security, video, voice, data, networking, unified communications and collaboration, and cloud and telecom services and planning.

Accomplished in management, I lead by example and believe in developing diverse, cross-functional, empowered teams with the support to excel.

I work to make sure users understand the full ramification of expenditures across budget silos within the data center ecosystem and intelligent buildings encompassing the technologies within these spaces. These principles are communicated via keynote speaking, direct meetings, designs, technical forums, and technical writings. I provide a strategy for products, services and channel relationships.

Marketing and communications leader, globally published in over 250 publications in 69 countries. I lead branding efforts via a mix of online, print and webcasts.
I am an industry blogger, and STEM enthusiast. Podcaster, Careers for women, trades, and veterans in tech and data centers.

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The post Why Now Is The Perfect Time For Women In Tech With Carrie Goetz appeared first on RCR Wireless News.