Note from Nicole: Marsha is a Team Manager for Chef Software. "Chef" is both the name of a company and the name of the software the company provides. Chef, the software, is an automation platform, meaning it focuses on the relationship between parts of a system to understand how changing one part of the system might affect the system as a whole.
However, the career advice Marsha provides below spans career industries, and is worth reading no matter what job you are seeking.
However, the career advice Marsha provides below spans career industries, and is worth reading no matter what job you are seeking.
| Marsha "I ensure post sales customer satisfaction, through pro serve consulting and technical services delivery, to maintain and/or increase product adoption." |
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Education
Required License(s)
For initial credibility, I had to get a few InfoSec certificates. It was useful for my job but not critical.
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Required Degree(s)
A Master's degree is good because it is often an interviewing gatekeeper. |
Importance of GPA
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What do you need to do to maintain your license(s)?
To maintain my certificates, I need to do professional hours against criteria set by the certification authority (usually about 40 hours of continuing education a year, plus some fees).
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Marsha's Highest Degree: Bachelor's degree (Bachelor of Arts) and MBA
Marsha's College Major: Bachelor's in English
Marsha's College GPA Range: 3.1-3.5
Salary
For Technical Project Managers (where I was about eight years ago) the range was about $110,000 -$130,000.
As a leadership team member, you generally make more.
Getting the Job
How did you get your job?
My initial job in consulting was landed in great part due to my security clearance I got during my time in the Army. In that first job, I spent nearly a decade learning all I could to be better technically, responding to proposals, and volunteering for many projects to be as well rounded and employable as possible.
After I left that first job and moved to a new company, I began to set only 3-5 year goals before I would anticipate a transition to a new employer. Sometimes that transition took place sooner, sometimes later. Either way, knowing I would need to demonstrate substantive impact in a year or two kept me sharp, or the resume would look unimpressive for that job, right? |
How important was networking to landing your position?
9 out of 10. I have always valued networking over all. And not as a catalyst to my success but also as a way to help others succeed too. Kind of a Career Karma bank.
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Life on the Job
What is a typical day (or week) for you like?
I am fortunate in that for my last three jobs I have worked from home/worked remote. My current company has about 70% of staff remotely working. So my weekdays are pretty routine. (Let the dog out, let the cats in, take kids to school, get more coffee, head to my home office and start work around 8am.) I am managing a team of 7 folks at this time, and I am ensuring they are happy, busy, engaged, enabled to do their job, and learning more each day so they can be more helpful to other team members and our clients.
We use Slack for 75% of communication, and Zoom for our meetings. I feel very connected to both my internal team, but also the many other Chef team members because of our level of use of these mediums. I talk with many clients per week, interface with our sales staff to write proposals and contracts, and I propose ways to improve our business processes and get the word out about our great company and product. |
How closely does your typical day (or week) match up to the general "job description" for your position?
The job description is filled with tasks and activities, like most jobs have. However, the nuances of listening and being a true consultant require me to be an advisor, focused on earning trust with my team, my managers, my clients, really everyone I interface with, and that is a day by day demonstration of positive, friendly interactions and behaviors that help me achieve my professional goals for my company. So I rely heavily on soft skills that do not easily translate to a job description per se.
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Does being a woman affect any aspect of your career?
It has. I enjoy being a woman in a to-date male dominated profession, but it has taken many jobs to get to a place that wholly values what I bring to the table as much as the technical engineers bring. It is hard to find companies that understand that to create a world-class team, there need to be a balance of both soft and hard skills, and that everyone benefits when one-upsmanship is frowned upon while collaboration is lauded.
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What is the best thing about your job?
The people I get to work with every day, and that I get to contemplate the future of cloud computing and automation (I'm a dreamer that way) and help my customers find their way to get there.
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What is the worst thing about your job?
I don't know. Nothing really. I think I would still work here even if I won the lottery.
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How demanding is your job?
I view the need for mental toughness to be a requirement to protect oneself when there are political issues rife within a company, or when the culture is broken, morale is low, turnover high, and you leave each day exhausted for the struggle. So in that way, I do not need a flack jacket at this job. I don't steel myself each day. I actually look forward to interacting with my team members. And we have unlimited PTO [paid time off], so if I need a mental health day, or the day off to take my kid to a doctors appointment or chaperone a field trip, I just do it. I've worked long and hard to get to this place. I absolutely do not take this for granted.
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Do you have any advancement opportunities?
Yes, I can transfer laterally to work with products or be an Engineering Manager. I can move vertically when the company grows or someone departs. But since I have only been in my position for 6 months, I feel it is incumbent on me to serve as a strong leader in my current position until I have made it the best it can be and I have identified and trained a sufficient backfill so as not to leave the team in a lurch. I love to imagine being more to a company whose values so closely mirror my own and that push me to learn and grow.
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Advice for You
What are the skills, characteristics, or talents that are most important to be effective in your position?
Me personally, the ability to use my high EQ [emotional intelligence] to put myself in the shoes of my customers who may in fact be struggling with a challenging, politically charged difficult environment. I care when people hurt, and to gain insights to their issues and respond with kindness, warmth, and a potential solution is pivotal to my success (and in my opinion, for anyone doing my/my kind of job).
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What advice would you give to someone thinking about pursuing a career like yours?
Nowadays, plan only 3-5 years ahead. You will be exposed to so much in that time that I am sure if you have any energy or drive or ambition, it will redefine what you think you want. That does not mean you are wishy-washy—it simply means you can go with the flow. That, in my opinion, will be more and more critical to your professional survival should you find you do not win the lottery this week and need to continue to work for the next 50 years.
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If you could do it over again, would you still pursue the same career?
I would not say I pursued this career. But would I follow the same path? Yes. Were it not for my crappy, I'd-rather-do-anything-but-this-job jobs, I would not have worked so hard to find the perfect-for-me-right-now place, where I currently, happily find myself.
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Follow Up
Want to learn more?
You can connect with Marsha
using LinkedIn here. According to Marsha, "If you personalize your request to connect, I almost always will connect back. I love to meet motivated, like-minded professionals." |
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