Career Advice, Culture, Women in STEM
Sometimes, it is obvious. Sometimes, it is subtle. Yet, in all cases, there are early warning signs. If only we could pause to take it in!
Where is that time anyway? When we are pursuing a Ph.D., juggling life as a student or mid-career professional, so often, we only catch ourselves off course a bit later than we would have liked.
The world of work, as we have known it has been changing for a long time now. If you are in the United States, the change has been visible…
Thanks to much-needed automation and business process improvements, essential for the evolution and optimization of business, the current workforce (yes, that is us!) are directly or indirectly in the path of changing work models that offer significant growth opportunities and yes, challenges.
The way I like to think about it is this: a challenge is an opportunity to rethink and reimagine the possibilities previously undiscovered.
As individuals, we spend a tremendous amount of time at work and put our hearts and souls into doing our very best to deliver stellar results, and look to grow with and within the organization. Passion, purpose, and growth are essential contributors to happiness. Happy employees find intrinsic motivation to explore, experiment and excel in their work through moments of Flow. That work happiness is abundantly positive and contagious in a way that radiates through every interaction with every person.
In the landscape of robots, robotic process automation, and AI that look to optimize work environments, there are naturally fewer vertical job opportunities as organizations realign to provide abundant lateral growth opportunities and training for their employees.
In the fast-changing world of work, it is natural to feel disappointed and frustrated when conversations with the manager on career-growth prospects either do not exist or are bland and uni-directional. We are human. It’s natural to want recognition and additional responsibilities that offer growth to learn something new.
When things go South, there are early warning signs in conversations such as “why you are not qualified” rather than “how you can acquire skills needed.” Then, out of the blue, that position you aspired to have and worked very hard to get goes to someone else.
Yes, it happened. You just got passed over for a promotion, and the only thought that fills your mind is that you must quit and find a new job on the internet!
How about we change the situation to our advantage? It is in moments of utter despair that we are closest to finding our success. But that can only happen if we can recover fast and find our inner strength to ReEmerge stronger and more resilient than we have ever been before.
We are amazing Individual Centers of Excellence (I.C.O.E.), and we own and drive our career to define our success.
We can grow in any direction we want and go as far as we choose to and do so at the pace that works for us.
Yes, take that vacation time off or mental health day to relax, recharge, and reactivate the inner core strengths that propel you forward. Identify new areas of growth within yourself and the organization.
You can leverage your tenure, experience, and expertise to your advantage and help support your organization’s business goals. Cross-pollination provides an excellent opportunity to add your uniquely human perspective.
Continuous learning is critical to personal and professional growth and helps to future proof your career, so keep learning! There are so many free and low-cost online options including Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, and also check for learning options within your organization.
Yes, there is hope, and there are new areas of growth…just not where you expected to find them.
Please, invest in your career success. Build on your tenure and grow with and within your organization.
So, have you identified any early warning signs? If so, have you looked at your career portal to initiate a conversation with another hiring manager?
Oh, the places you can go, if only you keep driving. Best of Luck!
(Originally published on LinkedIn November 4, 2019. Republished with permission.)
Career Advancement, Intern to full-time, Women in STEM
Do you have the right job?
Have you ever wondered if you have the right job? Or what makes it right for you? Is it the technologies, the money, the people around you, or is it the work-life balance? Do you sleep peacefully at night, thinking you had a good day at work?
I feel like I’m one of the luckiest ones to have it all. I am originally from India and came to the US to get my master’s degree in Computer Science. Straight out of college, a good company in Wisconsin hired me. During the two years of my life that I spent there, I always felt something missing. I was far away from friends or family, and I had no idea what work satisfaction meant or how to achieve it.
About ten years ago, I came across an entry-level position to create web pages for an HCM system in Alpharetta, a suburb north of Atlanta, GA. In that job, I worked on JSF and Dojo Toolkit. Yes, JSF and Dojo There was a pretty good market for people working on web applications using those technologies. Time flew by. I loved every second of it, but all good things come to an end.
We quickly changed to jQuery/Javascript with a heavy reliance on CSS. We switched from Web services to APIs and took on a new project to work. As one of four developers, I sat in a war room, trying to define an Agile process that worked for us and coming up with innovative ideas for the project.
Using blank pages, we drew how we wanted to display information to the user, how much information we need to show the user to avoid confusion, and how many steps it took to finish a task. We went to different departments at ADP, introduced ourselves to random people, and asked them to vote on our ideas. Doesn’t that sound like a lot of fun?!
All we needed were post-its, pencils, pens, white paper, and of course our shiny new MacBooks! Oh wait, did I say MacBooks, at work, nine years ago? YES! My husband was jealous. He had to carry a 100-pound IBM laptop! Did I mention that I got married that first year at ADP and bought a house? That I went from a carefree single life to a more responsible person?
Shortly after, I took on two new projects and went from an entry-level developer to a Senior, and then to a Lead. Having fun all along and a good work-life balance, I had my baby and took a long maternity leave. Then came the hard and challenging part for every new mom in the world, leaving my baby to go back to work. My colleagues, who had become my friends and family over the years, were very supportive and very kindly eased me back into work. We started a new project with five members on the team and grew into 80+ associates working on smaller and more focused areas within a year. Our main objective is to create the best experience for our users. We leveraged the latest and greatest technologies available. We started with AngularJS, Less, Bower, Webpack, and Node and currently on Angular 8 with SASS and Angular CLI. I am super proud to say that I work for ADP and MyADP, a team dedicated to creating the best HCM experience for millions of people!
I literally grew up in ADP between these five different projects over ten years. I got experience from five different jobs, learning every step of the way, growing my career from a junior developer to a Principal Architect, and becoming the best version of myself every single day. I am proud of every year, every day, and every minute I spent here and consider myself beyond blessed. I’m very grateful to my manager, who hired me ten years ago, and who remains an amazing leader for my team. I’m thankful for all the colleagues, leaders, and experiences that I have had over the years. Happy 10th Anniversary to me!
So, let me ask you this question again, do you have the right job? Or what makes it right for you? Is it the technologies, the money, the people around you, or is it the work-life balance? ADP is the place where you can have it all and don’t have to choose one over the other. Find your ideal job at tech.adp.com/careers.
Sree Malladi is a Principal Application Architect on ADP’s NAS team based in Alpharetta, Georgia.
Career Mobility, Career Advice, Voice of our People
Some years ago, I heard someone sarcastically say, “This is where elephants come to die” in response to me asking them why such intelligent people as themselves were still at that company.
Since then, I have been referring to “elephant graveyards” when describing companies and teams that don’t have headroom for intelligent people to rise the ranks and grow as engineers.
An elephant graveyard, when applied to a corporate setting, is a team, company, or some other set of conditions, in which otherwise bright engineers take positions or assignments where there is no hope for future career growth. In this post, I hope to define the conditions that must be present for an elephant graveyard to form, how to detect them, and how to navigate them.
An engineer’s career growth has three dimensions: skills, recognition, and compensation.
Skill growth is a function engineer learning new skills and becoming an expert through practicing newly acquired abilities on real-world projects.
Recognition is a function of showing initiative, applying new skills, and being recognized by supportive leadership.
Compensation is a function of recognition and skill growth.
An elephant graveyard forms when the three dimensions of career growth become stagnant.
Skill growth stagnates when the project reaches a certain level of maturity and is either no longer growing or is in a terminal decline. Projects reach maturity when they reach a critical mass in production and are no longer rapidly evolving. When the active development phase is over, the projects are often scaled back. When projects don’t rapidly evolve, there is no room for the acquisition of new skills.
Another reason for skill growth stagnation is the presence of the Smartest Person In The Room. The Smartest Person In The Room is either the developer themselves (which means they’ve outgrown the project and are now a toxic influence on it) or someone else (who created the conditions in which only his ideas are good).
The emergence of the Smartest Person In The Room is toxic to the team, and good leaders should discourage it. Since only their ideas count, the rest of the engineers can’t grow and earn recognition.
Recognition stagnates when skills stagnate, or the engineer loses leadership support, including management incompetence. When leadership is unsupportive, new skills don’t often earn any recognition.
When both skill growth and recognition stagnate, compensation stagnates as well. Chances are higher if you work for a well-run company, the reward system is in line with skill growth and recognition. Poorly run companies, not so much. Companies that create artificial limitations barriers, like title hierarchies, run the risk of losing technologists for compensation reasons.
First of all, try and detect an elephant graveyard before you join the company. Ask questions about team dynamics and the project maturity cycle. Don’t join a company or a team where elephants come to die.
If you find yourself in an elephant graveyard, however, it’s not all over. Evaluate your overall situation. Is work-life balance important to you at this phase of your life? Are you fairly compensated at this moment in time? Are there opportunities within your company on other projects? Is there an opportunity to shake things up on your existing project?
As long as there is room to grow, there is no reason to be restless. You are not an elephant, and you are not in a graveyard. Not yet, at least.
Published by Oleg Dulin
I am a software engineer and technology architect in New York City / New Jersey area. All opinions expressed here are mine and do not represent the opinions of my employers and customers, nor should my opinions be construed as opinions about my employers and customers.
Reprinted/Edited with permission. Read the original post.
Community, Diversity
I never get tired of hearing students get excited about technology and business.
“I really liked the different activities that we could do. It was fun using the VR and learning more about Python.” –Jane, 9th grade
“I applied my previous knowledge, but I also learned how to be a group leader and split the work evenly.” –Kush, 11th grade
While we get the opportunity to do some amazing things at ADP, how often do you get to also say that you were a positive influence in a young person’s career? That you were personally involved in encouraging someone who became a next generation tech entrepreneur? Or maybe you’ll find out in a few years that the high school student you mentored eventually wound up developing an innovative solution to detect and stop criminals. Or perhaps you’ll hear that they contributed to find a cure for a debilitating illness or disease.
Well, some of your fellow associates are doing just that. Once again, ADP proudly sponsored the Junior Achievement of New Jersey’s HackJA events for the 2019-2020 school year. If you didn’t already know, HackJA is a 24-hour hackathon for approximately 100 New Jersey high school students, which is held twice every school year in October and February. During HackJA, students are assigned tasks and challenges related to computer science and information technology. Students also participate in workshops and meet with mentors from various backgrounds.
Several of our ADP associates from New Jersey and New York volunteered at HackJA. They helped students with their projects, helped prepare student presentations, and judged the final submissions.
“I had tons of fun being a judge. I was impressed by 30+ high school teams who presented projects that were put together within a weekend. Many not only worked, but very inspirational. I would highly recommend this event to everyone!” said Bo Li, Senior Director, GPT Product Management, and HackJA volunteer.
Although most volunteers have been from Global Product & Technology (GPT) and the Global Security Organization (GSO), we also had wonderful volunteers from other areas like Sales, Finance and Global Shared Services. In addition to providing their technical expertise in areas like web design, coding, data science, robotics, and cyber security, our volunteers also helped the students with public speaking, teamwork, career exploration discussions and presentation development.
Samantha Barone, MAS Sales District Manager and two-time HackJA volunteer said, “I loved the event and I had such a fun time speaking with the students and learning about what they were passionate about. I was in awe of how incredibly intelligent every student was and their technological abilities. One of my most cherished times with ADP by far.”
There is something incredibly rewarding about helping to a future generation of technical professionals who will change the world and hopefully become ADP associates someday!
More about Junior Achievement of New Jersey
Junior Achievement (JA) of New Jersey is a non-profit organization dedicated to preparing young people in grades K-12 to succeed in a global economy through real world relationships with business, government and educational partners. All JA programs are provided at no cost to schools, students or their families, and emphasize real world learning experiences and motivate youth to achieve by connecting them with corporate and community role models committed to investing in their future.
BY RAJ UTTAMCHANDANI
Early Talent, Diversity, Women in STEM
Speaking at#GHC19 was a priceless experience! It was truly an honor to be accepted to speak at GHC.
Jyotsna M. Speaker GHC 2019; 12th year at ADP | Lead Product Manager – Security, Access and Identity Management, Global Products and Technology
It gives me great joy to write my first article and dedicate it to the amazing Grace Hopper Celebration 2019 in Orlando, Florida. Wow, 25,000 attendees and very well organized and executed, congrats to all.
Speaking at#GHC19 was a priceless experience! It was truly an honor to be accepted to speak at GHC. Thoroughly enjoyed and loved the amazing experience speaking at #GHC19 at CR222: Designing a Happy Career and Loving your Work at the Hyatt Orlando Ballroom L.
I am feeling very blessed to have had this opportunity to make an impact on the career growth for success and happiness of 400 women and so many more through this session. Thank you #AnitaB.
Heard of Buy One Get One Free? That’s it — First-time speaker and first-time attendee… super cool and a blessing to remember and reflect on the opportunity. There is an unwritten rule, rightfully so, to be aware of the great responsibility that I have been given to share, inspire, and empower our attendees, mostly women and students, to pursue their career aspirations and find areas to grow in the landscape of AI, robot, and robotic process automation.
“Keep learning, keep growing, and be happy always.”
Video recording of CR222: Designing a Happy Career and Loving your Work delivered on Oct. 4, 2019
Stop worrying, start preparing! It is natural to be worried about jobs disappearing because of a fast-changing industry where the norm is either disrupt or be disrupted. Worrying does not help, it that not true? So why not apply the lessons from our own life to prepare for the future that is here and now?
Got to love networking and meeting new people who become friends! It was an amazing experience to attend the celebration, connect with amazing speakers during the speaker reception and build relationships that we will cherish for a long time and take this priceless memory with us. Everywhere we go, people want to know that we are a #GHC19_Speaker. Let us make a meaningful difference in our communities and help support each other.
Work culture matters! We spend a phenomenal amount of time at work and it is most important to be in an environment that is accepting you for the person you are and providing you the coaching to mold you into the person you become as you learn to grow with and within the organization. It was a fantastic opportunity to connect and bond with my friends at ADP. I can just go on and on about how cool it is to know about the different projects we work on and how we brainstorm and connect as people first to deliver the best results for our business. We are a very diverse team and it is great to work in a culture that is inclusive and promotes talent growth and innovation in everything we do… it’s priceless! Checkout ADP Tech careers!
Diversity and Inclusion are most important for the success of the business! The mention of #GHC19 and AnitaB.Org — leading the frontiers in diversity, inclusion, and beyond… empowers you to find your inner courage and step up the game to be part of a cause that is so much bigger than ourselves. I am talking about achieving the rightful recognition for our work and opportunities to pursue career aspirations and initiate crucial conversations with the manager or mentor on ways to grow with and within the organization.
Mentoring — A GIFT THAT PAYS FORWARD! Truly thrilled to have the opportunity to mentor our student attendees to share our experiences and help them navigate the current landscape.
Time goes fast… Yes, it is natural to want to be in that space of GHC and not leave. Yet, we have the responsibility to bring back our learnings with us to apply at work so we can change our minds, change our perspectives, and set course towards career success and abundant happiness for ourselves. This inner happiness will propel us forward and become our catalyst to create new pathways to pursue.
#WEWILL change the world as we design our own careers and find our new destinations in our unique journeys for a very happy career journey. Future is here and now… 3, 2, 1 — let’s reactivate our career aspirations and find our happiness doing what we love — it’s important!
Let the learning continue… here is to continued success to all of us in all that we do! Best of Luck! See you soon #GHC20.
(Originally published on LinkedIn October 10, 2019. Republished with permission.)
Best advice Samantha ever received? “If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.”
Samantha Ortiz started out as a zookeeper. Then she went into marketing. Now she’s a software engineer at ADP’s Innovation Lab working on its NextGen Platform. Her ever-present curiosity, creativity, and passion for understanding behavior and solving problems have been common threads throughout her varied life experiences.
From Horses to Manatees …
Samantha was born and raised in the Bronx and was comfortable in the city, but she always had an interest in the natural world around her. Her older brother raised tropical poison dart frogs at home, and she was mesmerized as a child while observing them in their terrariums. She also spent most of her free time riding and training horses at Riverdale Riding Center in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, expanding the interest she had in animals.
After spending most of her life in the city, her family moved to Florida, and she was suddenly surrounded by agriculture. She made the most of her new journey in life. Sam joined the local Future Farmers of America, becoming the chapter’s student advisor and showing a pig at the county fair. Sam also continued her love of riding horses by finally fulfilling her dream of owning a horse and practicing dressage. “My mother was always so supportive of my adventures with animals,” she says. “Even if she felt a little out of place on the farm – she is a New York native, after all – she was there for me every step I took.”
Her passion for understanding living things continued in college as she studied psychology at New College of Florida, focusing on animal behavior and conservation. She spent her undergraduate years working with a wide range of animals, from studying manatee sensory behavior to handedness preferences in lemurs. Sam also conducted research on numerous species of fish, including Indian Mudskippers (an amphibious fish), and Stoplight Parrotfish. She spent several summers in Panama working on her thesis research on Parrotfish’s feeding behavior and its effects on coral reefs. She was also introduced to design, exploring zoo and aquarium design, its effects on animals, and how it fosters conservation behaviors in visitors.
… and from Reptiles to Coding
After college, she worked as a zookeeper in Florida, caring for animals and presenting reptile educational programs to visitors. “So many people were curious about alligator behavior, especially since we were in Florida,” Samantha says. “I shared with them how human actions, particularly humans feeding wildlife, would contribute negatively to the animals’ natural behavior, making them more dangerous as they’d become acquainted to people. Everyone’s actions and behaviors affect something or someone else.”
Samantha’s natural interest in behavior took her down a winding path beyond the natural world and into technology.
A relationship took her to Texas, where she worked for a digital marketing consultancy. While she worked as a copywriter and copy editor, Sam also started to combine her knowledge of behavior with the tools of technology. The marketing campaigns she ran combined multiple applications, and she realized she wanted a deeper understanding of the software she was using. How did it target specific demographics? What data did it use to determine which campaigns would trigger actionable behavior in users? “Where I went to college, they encourage you to be an independent thinker and deeply analyze things,” she says. “That’s how I have always approached everything.”
Samantha started to explore coding by teaching herself web development through an online program. After relocating back to New York, she applied to Hack Reactor, an intensive, full-time coding boot camp
“At first, I was telling myself I’m not ready, maybe it’s too late, I don’t know if I can do this,” she remembers. “So, I started with some prep classes before deciding that software engineering was what I wanted to do.”
Coming to ADP
While Samantha was at Hack Reactor, she built applications with classmates, and two of them went on to work at ADP. She was invited to a networking night at the ADP Innovation Lab, where “I met lots of fun, intelligent people who love what they do. I started talking to Yaara (Katz) and we just clicked. It was so great to meet another female software engineer with a passion for her work. We laughed and I really felt comfortable. I knew I was home.”
Samantha loves software engineering, noting, “It’s such a creative process. I have loved writing my whole life, and designing programs and coding is similar. We notice the audience, figure out how to present the information and design the task, and focus on the user. Building software is writing; refactoring code is editing.”
Continuous learning is another part of the job Samantha loves. “Every day is a different challenge,” she says. “I get to work with new technologies, learning more every step of the way. I am part of a team with great people, and I always feel valued. I started around Christmas a few years ago, and they invited me to their holiday party before I even started. Any idea I have is considered by my team. That’s been true from the first day I walked in the door.”
The best advice Samantha has received was from one of her software engineering instructors, she says: “If you are the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room. Keep learning. Stay open — even if you’re scared or not feeling confident.”
Samantha’s advice to people considering a career shift is, “I wished I had jumped into coding earlier, when I was first drawn to it. Making a change doesn’t have to be a scary obstacle. Take it in steps, and know that everyone is learning all the time.”
Yasminay Molina has been promoted not once, not twice, but a whopping six times throughout her time with ADP.
Having first joined the management services company in 2008, Molina says the company “lives up to its values, has an amazing culture and is continuously willing to invest in my growth and development.”
Now, she’s the Director of Implementation for the southern region, having climbed the proverbial ladder thanks to her relentless curiosity, her participation in the company’s emerging leader program, and her use of performance and strategy conversations to expand her expertise.
“At ADP, there are countless opportunities available,” Molina said. “I also have leaders that support and believe in me. In addition, and probably most important, is the ability to reinvent myself. Every company is looking to grow in a world that is fast-changing. We have to be willing and able to change with it and bring new, fresh ideas to the table.”
We recently spoke to Molina about how she’s advanced at the same company without job hopping, as well as the most exciting part of her role. Here’s what she had to say.
How long have you been with your company? What about it made you first want to join?
I have been with ADP for a little over 11 years. I joined shortly out of college, just looking for a 9-5 job. I stayed because I found a career with a company that lives up to its values, has an amazing culture, and is continuously willing to invest in my growth and development.
Tell me about the roles that you’ve held at your company, as well as your current one. What about this role most excites you?
I started at ADP as a Client Services Representative assisting small businesses with payroll and tax questions. After three years in this role, I wanted to learn more about the lifecycle of our clients, so I became an Implementation Specialist. In this role, I helped onboard our new small business clients. I trained them on their products and services, making sure they were set up for future success. During this time and due to my performance, I was selected to participate in our emerging leader program. This gave me exposure to different aspects of the business and helped prepare me for my next role as an Implementation Team Lead.
As a Team Lead, I worked directly with my leaders learning how to motivate my associates in a positive way to drive results. I was able to participate in many conversations involving performance and strategy. In less than a year, I was promoted to Implementation Manager for the same team and then Implementation Manager II two years later. During my tenure in these roles, I was responsible for leading a team of implementation specialists, managing a relationship with our sales partners for six out of the 11 regions, as well as taking a leader under my wing.
I am now the Director of Implementation for the southern region. In this role, as well as in my previous roles, I am responsible for the development of my leaders and for our overall results. The most exciting part in my current role is that I get to directly impact and develop my leaders and, through them, our associates.
What’s something you’re especially good at, at work?
Connecting with people and building relationships.
What’s the first (and/or last) thing you do at work every day?
The first thing I do when I get to the office is say “good morning” to all of my associates and colleagues. As a leader, I recognized early on that it is the people that make me successful and I’m lucky enough to work with the best.
I do my best to remain present for my people during business hours, so the last thing I do is take care of any pending items before I leave to make a fresh start the next day!
A lot of people believe that developing your career means changing companies, and not infrequently. What has enabled you to develop/advance your career without job hopping?
The company I work for plays a major role in this. At ADP, there are countless opportunities available. I also have leaders that support and believe in me. In addition, and probably most important, is the ability to reinvent myself. Every company is looking to grow in a world that is fast-changing. We have to be willing and able to change with it, and bring new and fresh ideas to the table.
What’s something you think most people don’t know about your company that you think they should?
ADP truly does care about and invest in their people. My voice and the voice of the people matter.
What was the best quality of the best boss you’ve ever had?
Trustworthiness.
What’s the most memorable piece of career advice you’ve received?
I can’t choose just one, but I’ll leave you with two that have stuck out and resonated with me the most:
“People first. The rest will come.”
“Never be the smartest person in the room.”