Tomorrow I start a new job at a new company and I am incredibly excited. I mean really really excited. Everyone wants to make a difference within an organization, everyone wants to make an impact, everyone wants to keep learning. Everyone wants to surround themselves with people who have the same passion and that you can learn from. I must be the luckiest woman in the world because I can honestly say that throughout my career I have been given some amazing opportunities and worked at some of the best companies.
Well tomorrow that does not change. Tomorrow I start working at Juniper Networks within the Security Business Unit as a Virtualization Architect. I get to join Chris Hoff’s team at Juniper. How awesome is that?!?
The craziest thing about all this? Is that it started through social media. Well that and Ed Saipetch. I met Chris when he worked for Cisco and still lived on the East Coast. It was a small Cloud social event (and I know their brains will remember it’s name but I don’t). I remember that I did not want to go but Ed insisted and I went anyway (ironically, who gave me the name commondenial too? Yup Ed. literally). So before Thanksgiving I saw a tweet come in from Chris. It was a random tweet but I thought I would ask him if he could give me work advice since I was stuck between a couple of positions at VMware. So that is the short story but personally I love the story because it shows that you never know your network until you reach out to it. You never know until you ask others for their thoughts. As much as I used to hate social media, I can honestly say that it has changed my life… thank you EMC vSpecialists for “making” me get in to it.
I had always admitted to everyone that I knew the next change in my career would be BIG… and I believe this move that I have decided to make is BIG for me. I will no longer be a Systems Engineer. For seven years… I have been an SE for seven years… that in itself will be a change. And I will go back to a networking company where it all started for me (out of college I worked for Bay Networks/Nortel). As I mentioned I am really excited and now I have to go pick out my outfit for my first day 🙂
