1) Continue doing hands on labs through SkillBuilder to refine my skills. I’ve learned a great deal in the world of enterprise scale for Cloud Operations, Generative AI, and Security and I’m going to double down on those while also seeking Quantum Computing learning opportunities. <- I doubled down, but not necessarily on SkillBuilder. I participated in the BeSA Batch 9 on Agentic AI, built my own personal agent to help with homeschool learning activies for my kids, and continued with TryHackMe SOC2 Learning Path.
2) Make my learning actionable by creating a technology roadmap and strategy to continue to build a secure, dynamic, and innovative cloud platform. <- This is hard. The challenge here is that there are more people also looking to make a roadmap for their capabilities. Sometimes it involves the platform that my team and I support, but we’re not always in the conversation on how we make sure the “how” meets everyones needs. I also see the asks that we have to others can also impede others from their own roadmap. I don’t take for granted the opportunities to work with busy people to accomplish big goals, but I probably underestimated the effort needed to actually do it. I think this is a stretch area for me in Q2
3) Refine skills in leadership so I can strengthen my people-centered approach as a technical lead for our cloud platform team. <- My biggest focus this year has been on continuing to learn and develop both relational and emotional intelligences. The surprise here for me was that people actually are open to me being a mentor, another thing I don’t take for granted. With this opportunity, I get to share some lessons learned through my experience of applying what I’ve learned from leadership programs and podcasts from my favorites like Dr. Dharius Daniels, John Maxwell, and Craig Groeschel. Really excited about continuing this for the rest of the year.