Draft Your Narrative: Writing and Building a Technical Portfolio with Jason Belk (2/2)

Nerd Journey

Have you developed a personal narrative covering the important accomplishments in your career? Contrary to what many people think, our work does not speak for itself. We have to speak for our work. Jason Belk, our guest in episode 284, used writing to prepare his own narrative before sharing it verbally the first time, and he has continued to iterate on that narrative over time.

In this episode you’ll hear reasons technologists should build a portfolio of work much like an artist. We’ll hear how Jason built his own portfolio of work through the lens of his time working at Cisco and Network to Code. Jason will discuss how each job change has been a chance to focus more of his time on something he enjoys and what he likes about working in developer relations. You will also hear tips for detecting stress and advice on preparing for layoff situations.

Original Recording Date: 06-28-2024

Jason Belk is a Senior Technical Advocate at Cisco and someone who tries to be a constant learner. If you missed part 1 of our discussion with Jason, check out Episode 283.

Topics – Demonstrating Experience with a Portfolio of Work, Building a Public Profile and Developing a Narrative, Network to Code, A Course Builder, Noticing Stress, The Return to Cisco, The Constant Iteration, Thoughts on Layoffs

2:56 – Demonstrating Experience with a Portfolio of Work

• Nick has spoken with a number of people who ran into issues not having experience at the scale a company wants or not having any experience in a production environment.
  • “I think just like artists have a portfolio of their work online, you as a technical person, if you want to be directing your own career, should have a portfolio of your work. And that looks different for different roles.” – Jason Belk
  • For example, Jason wrote a course in markdown and put it on his GitHub, which led to a job opportunity outside of Cisco.
  • There are many free and low cost options that can allow us to gain experience with a technology like containers, public cloud (AWS), etc.
    • Cisco has built in lab environments for their courses.
    • Cisco DevNet has reservable sandbox environments to play around with network automation technologies as an example.
    • If we take one of these demo environments and try to extend the scenario given as a learning opportunity, it could add to our portfolio.
    • “…Finding ways of taking the existing task that you’re familiar with and then expanding on that and then documenting that into your portfolio…. That’s a huge part for me – finding ways of taking these concepts and then continuing to incrementally extend them in ways that other people can reproduce.” – Jason Belk
    • For example, we can include things like scripts to automate tasks and specific configurations of containers we used to accomplish tasks in our portfolio. Documenting these items as well are part of portfolio building.
    • Production will look different depending on the environment you’re in. When Jason worked as part of Cisco IT’s network operations team, they had 10,000 network devices (across routers, switches, and access points), which doesn’t include any devices connected to each of those network devices. These devices were spread across 600 sites. There’s no way Jason could have reproduced this kind of environment on his own outside of working in that environment.
    • The size of a network would determine how many employees are required to manage it. Jason suggests looking at job descriptions to understand the size of an environment a network engineer would be responsible for managing and the specific skills needed (i.e. understanding of specific routing protocols etc.). This information can be used to help us focus our efforts to build or grow a portfolio of work.
    • “What are people expecting right now, and how many of those things do I know? And if you’re seeing trends among those, start building scenarios that allow you to do that at scale for yourself at a scale that makes sense. You don’t need to have 10,000 devices, but you probably want more than 5.” – Jason Belk
• We should ask about scale in interviews if things are not clear to determine if we are in over our heads from a scale perspective.
• How can we communicate the scale of our experience in an honest way and still hope to get the job?
  • If asked specifically about scale of experience, be honest. But it might not make sense to volunteer weakness pre-emptively unless you have specific concerns.
  • It is likely you will be able to figure things out and will get some help from others on the team to understand scaling issues that might be outside your experience.
  • Reflecting once more on his time in network operations for Cisco, Jason spoke to the challenge of needing to update software on network devices all over the world. It was the nature of the connections that presented a challenge and not just the sheer number of network devices.
    • When updating devices on unreliable connections (i.e. intermittent connectivity, low bandwidth / throughput), software transfer would start over if interrupted, and product managers only working in test labs did not take this into consideration. Jason ended up giving product teams feedback based on the challenges he and others on the team encountered.
    • “I think there are just certain things that you will learn once you’re on the job, but you need to be aware and keen and looking out for those problems.” – Jason Belk
    • Jason mentioned having someone from Cisco’s technical support on the team who had been troubleshooting various problems for years and knew what to look for to build a more resilient solution.
    • A number of certification exams have troubleshooting scenarios, and these scenarios should cover issues that could actually happen in a production environment.

9:43 – Building a Public Profile and Developing a Narrative

• At what point in his career did Jason start building a public profile / public body of work?
  • About 5 years after Jason started at Cisco, he started building a public profile (after 3 years as an analyst and 2 years as a network engineer).
  • Jason wanted to be open to other opportunities, and he had a lot of good mentors in his life at the time. He doesn’t specifically remember someone recommending he build a public profile.
  • Jason says this is not as common as it should be on the technical side because people tend to assume their work will speak for itself. This is a poor assumption!
    • Jason emphasizes the importance of communicating our accomplishments to our managers because they will forget. We cannot expect to be promoted if we don’t share the work we are doing with our manager.
  • If you want to protect yourself from layoffs and continue to get pay raises as you add more value…
    • “If you’re a constant learner, listening to a podcast like this, listening to someone like us talk about career development, you’re already in a fraction of the percent that is caring about their job more than most people. If you’re listening to this podcast you’re probably somebody who should be building some type of public profile. It doesn’t have to be a GitHub profile like I was talking about…. You can just blog. You can say ‘this is what I’ve learned from project management, this is what I’ve learned from leadership, this is what I’ve learned from conflict resolution. There’s so many different directions even apart from the technical side that you could be sharing your learnings, and then that gives you an artifact then you then can share with other people regardless of their background. And also, it gives you confidence that you can see over time how you’ve grown.” – Jason Belk
  • We’ve talked about taking notes and regularly documenting our work on the show. Jason highlights that this a is good exercise to prepare for things like yearly performance reviews and evaluations. It will also be easier to submit an updated resume when we see a job that looks appealing.
    • “But the meaty stuff, the technical stuff, the stuff that’s going to actually get you the job and get people excited to talk to you…it’s going to be better while you’re freshly working on it. If I tried to retroactively go back and redo all the work that I’ve done over the past ten years on that profile, it would be a Herculean effort and probably would never happen…. Take the time to find a way to document your learnings. It doesn’t have to be eloquent. It doesn’t have to be perfect. And you can always go back and edit it. Nothing is set in stone.” – Jason Belk, on the importance of consistently documenting accomplishments
    • Writing something on LinkedIn or anywhere else can be changed later. It’s a draft that can be written and rewritten. We can describe an accomplishment differently if that is better suited to showcase experience for a role. Do we at least have our first draft documented somewhere?
  • Jason says for a platform like LinkedIn, it’s ok to not post whatever you might be thinking.
    • LinkedIn has become a place for longer form content with more of a shelf life. Jason may post on Twitter to share an initial thought and then build a better draft for LinkedIn later. He likes to use Apple notes to capture ideas from random moments of inspiration before later posting on Twitter.
    • Jason likes the Software Defined Talk podcast where they talk about living the default lifestyle and the benefits of technology ecosystems.
    • There are benefits of note taking software on your mobile device to capture and formulate thoughts.
    • Jason likes to use voice to text as well to get thoughts out of his head.
    • Nick feels Jason is encouraging us to share refined, complete thoughts on platforms like LinkedIn. We can track these over time to see our own progress, which can spur us to take on new challenges.
• “One of the reasons I’m able to come on this podcast and have these great conversations about my career is that this isn’t the first time I’ve had this conversation…. I’ve talked about my career so many times over the years, and I have my own internal narrative…. You kind of fit into a groove after you start explaining things a number of times where it makes it easier then to communicate your value…. You have this narrative in your head that…will help you in those job interview situations, your management conversations when you’re talking promotions, and even just for your own mental health and knowing that what you’re doing is making a difference in whatever area of the world that you’re working in.” – Jason Belk
  • Situations like the interview or performance review are like presentations we might not be prepared for with a narrative we can tell. Would we prepare just as much for one of these situations as we would for a presentation at a conference?
  • Jason remembers the first time he shared part of his career story on a podcast. He had a bunch of notes and his resume open to help him deliver the narrative.
  • “I found a way to write into words what that narrative was, and then that’s the narrative that I’ve been continuing…when I go on and I share with other people the different things that I’ve worked on.” – Jason Belk

17:57 – Network to Code

• Jason first worked as an analyst in Cisco IT who moved to network engineering as part of the campus and branch team. He began to do more work with Python and automation and developed the skill of helping other network engineers learn to code.
• “I find the most interesting jobs, the most interesting things I get to do in my work, are the ones that I self-direct and suggest to my managers. So I would say if you ever feel like you’re struggling to find interesting work, you should be more proactive in suggesting things that you could be doing.” – Jason Belk
  • Jason’s manager wanted someone on the team to do automation (which signaled a management priority). He already liked making things more efficient and had a computer science background.
  • More of Jason’s value was demonstrated through acting as a project manager, a scrum master, a leader, a mentor, and a teacher more so than as a front line network engineer
• Jason knew Network to Code was a thought leader in vendor neutral network automation and that they made contributions to the open source community. He was also a member of their Slack community
  • Jason felt the people at the company were there to do the right thing and solve problems for the tech industry as a whole (not just their customers).
  • Network to Code did consulting work, but there were no official job openings. Jason had been following them on Twitter. Jason had also read Network to Code founder Jason Edelman’s book on network automation.
  • When Edelman posted about needing to hire people, Jason sent him a link expressing his interest in teaching and information on his background (including a link to the NSO course on GitHub he had built using markdown).
  • The process happened quickly, and within a week Jason had interviews and then suddenly left Cisco.
• At this point Jason had been at Cisco 7 years and wanted to see if grass was greener outside that bubble.
  • Leading up to this, management was beginning to focus on areas outside of where Jason was building expertise. A co-worker of Jason’s had recently left Cisco too, and it seemed like the right time to make a move.
  • “It was a big leap of faith because this was the first job I’d ever taken where I didn’t know anybody in the company. I knew the vibes of the company from being involved in their online Slack community.” – Jason Belk
  • Jason would move from a 60,000 person company to a company with only 11 people.
  • This was also a move to working remotely. Jason had been going to an office to work for Cisco in San Jose, but he would be the first west coast hire for Network to Code.
  • Jason worked remotely and traveled often. He would visit customer sites, building and delivering course curriculum.
    • Jason mentions this really helped build his presentation skills. In many ways it was sink or swim.
  • Joining Network to Code was a big risk for Jason. He was leaving people and a culture he knew for a much smaller company that was still in the startup phase. Despite this, Jason built a number of great relationships at Network to Code.
• After working for Network to Code for a couple of years, Jason was starting to get burned out.
  • He noticed marital problems and that he was gaining weight.
  • Jason was also working constantly. A consulting company commits to specific deliverables for their customers, and in many ways this creates a culture of excellence that can make it hard to achieve the balance one might want between work and personal life.
  • Jason and his wife also wanted to have children, and when an opportunity to return to Cisco presented itself, it made sense to pursue going back to the big company.

22:38 – A Course Builder

• The NSO course began as a way to document learnings for Jason’s local team in San Jose. Jason had a co-worker who knew GitHub and markdown really well, allowing Jason to learn it along with him. Once the course was built and presented to Jason’s manager, the manager wanted to use it to train people in Cisco IT from other locations.
  • They were given 3-6 months to build the training and had setup a lab to go along with it. The plan was to dedicate 3 days each to train co-workers in London and Bangalore, India. They delivered the training successfully in both locations with Jason and his two co-workers taking turns presenting. The trainings went well and were extremely relevant to those who attended. The content was built by network engineers like Jason from scenarios in tickets they had received.
  • Jason stresses the importance of building relevance into what you’re teaching, especially if you’re teaching your own team.
  • Jason asked to publish the course online after all trainings were delivered. His co-workers who helped develop the course had lost interest and moved on to other things, being less focused on teaching than he was. Jason ended up putting it on his GitHub profile. The course gained so much popularity that it was later used to influence the way Cisco looked at future NSO courses. Jason mentions people reached out to him for years about the course, even asking that its content be updated.
  • The key was supportive management behind this work who were willing to pay for travel. Jason and his co-workers were willing to travel internationally to deliver the training. It was a great experience to go visit international co-workers in person in places like India, where Jason had never previously been.
  • It can be hard to build connections with co-workers in such different time zones. The time difference between the US and India creates minimal overlap in working hours.
• Nick can see how the role at Network to Code with a greater focus on instruction and teaching was a logical progression path for Jason.
  • Jason says he was able to grow and learn so much while working at Network to Code, but it was not sustainable based on the way Jason operates his life and how much stress he wants to have at work.
  • Network to Code also grew in its employees from 11 people to around 50 or 60 during the period Jason worked there.
  • Jason might have stayed there longer if a perfect opportunity had not come his way.
  • Working for a smaller company allows you to sometimes have more autonomy or take something and run with it (less rigidity of silos compared to a large company)

27:09 – Noticing Stress

• How did Jason notice that he was overstressed and near burnout?
  • The first signs were physical. Jason was gaining weight even before Network to Code in his role as part of the network operations team.
    • One way we can pinpoint stress is to think about whether we are seeking comfort in unhealthy foods or substances as an outlet for our situational stress.
    • Jason also tells us it was stressful to serve in an on-call rotation as a network engineer. While some people really enjoy this type of work, it was not for him.
    • Our physical health is a good measure of whether we may be under stress. Pay attention to whether it has changed.
  • Jason describes the blank check exercise for family / friends. Ask them to give you candid 1-1 feedback on how they think you are doing based on everything you talk about.
  • “Look at your text conversations with your family, friends. Are you treating people in a way that is respectful and calm and collected, or are you always jumping from one thing to the next, putting out fires? I mean, we all have situations where we have crunch time, but day after day, week after week, month after month…is the house always burning? And is it always top of mind for you?” – Jason Belk
    • If work is always tough, it may be a systemic issue that needs to be addressed in a conversation with your manager. Or, maybe it’s time to make some kind of career change.
  • Nick suggests maybe we should look at the sentiment of our social media posts as well similar to what Jason said about our text messages.
    • “One of the beliefs I have from my own personal studies is…your words are a reflection of your inner thoughts. It’s an outflow of whatever your heart is filled with.” – Jason Belk
    • We should also consider outside influences and how they can affect the way we act and what we might post on a social media platform.

30:21 – The Return to Cisco

• We spoken with others who have left and returned to a company. What did Jason hope might be different when he returned to Cisco?
  • Jason took comfort in returning to known a positive company culture.
  • Cisco leadership have been consistent over time in a message of empathy for customers and employees alike. Jason had already worked with so many great people during his previous role at Cisco.
  • Jason was able to find a company where the rhetoric from leadership aligned with Jason’s values and how he wanted to live his life.
  • This was also a good work / life balance opportunity for Jason. He had relocated while at Network to Code from San Jose, CA to Reno, NV and could easily re-enter Cisco as an employee working in Nevada.
    • Relocating while working for the same company could prove challenging and take a lot of time.
  • Sometimes leaving a company will accelerate compensation raises more than staying will. Jason was able to increase his salary by leaving and then returning at a faster rate than yearly raises would have done.
  • Upon returning to Cisco, Jason brought more relevant skills after working with many customers in the industry at Network to Code.
  • Jason and his wife wanted to start a family, and he wanted to work remotely.
  • Jason wanted more of a strategic role focused on the work he enjoyed.
  • To follow the story, Jason had been in network operations at Cisco and was doing teaching. He moved out of network operations to focus on teaching and did some consulting for Network to Code. While Jason loved the teaching part of his role at Network to Code, he did not like the traveling and being in the classroom 5 days per week. He did not want to be an instructor when he came back to Cisco
    • Jason had seen other people working in developer relations roles to help network engineers get started with automation and was looking for something similar.
    • “That seemed so cool. It seemed like you get to teach, but you don’t have to be…in a classroom and you don’t have to be traveling all the time. You can just be doing the teaching part and influencing people without having to commit to all the other baggage that made it stressful for me. Finding what worked, what I enjoyed about my job, and then honing in on the parts that sparked the most joy, that gave me the most satisfaction, that decreased my stress the most… Each job I got, I got a little bit closer to doing what I really love doing.” – Jason Belk
    • After starting as an IT analyst Jason wanted to be more technical and became a network engineer. After not enjoying an on-call role in network operations, he wanted to focus on teaching. Part of developer relations were things like community building and content creation, which Jason was already doing on the side.
  • Though he wasn’t really looking for a job, Jason saw a posting for a NSO BU developer advocate, and he felt like the job description was written for him. After contacting a friend for validation, Jason applied.
  • Jason came back to Cisco multiple pay grades higher than when he had left and was able to work out of his home in Reno, NV.
  • “Whenever I move I always try to ensure that I’m making more money, and sometimes that requires some push back.” – Jason Belk
  • Jason shares the story of having to push back on artificial boundaries when changing roles. We can be confident in our skills when negotiating an offer, especially if we don’t need to make a change because we are happy.

35:52 – The Constant Iteration

• The constant iteration of Jason’s jobs reminded Nick of our conversation about taking something and extending to just outside your reach – how does he determine what the most interesting thing is and if it has changed?
  • Jason says this happens more in hindsight and not by looking for it in the moment.
  • We can set a directional goal and know it will take some time to get there. But we should take the time to enjoy all the little steps on the way to getting there.
    • For Jason, he wanted to be in developer relations but knew he would need to build the skills to get there like teaching, documentation, and getting more technical.
    • Spending too long in the same role (i.e. 7-10 years) might not challenge you to learn new skills.
    • Jason has switched jobs roughly every 3 years. It takes him about a year to feel like he has his bearings within an organization. Jason would use the 2nd year to understand how to add value and where his unique skillset can be used to fill gaps. The next step is bring in insights and value from outside the organization.
    • Jason has been in the training and certification role for almost 3 years and recently attended a Splunk conference. He shares the story of meeting someone who created a lot of helpful Splunk content and suggested they stay in contact to continue momentum with Splunk content.
    • Jason tells us to pay attention to those special connections like the one described above and that we should make sure to follow up.
    • Jason uses his outlook calendar for a time tracker and an aspirational action item list.
    • “Just like I would schedule a meeting with somebody to solve a problem, I schedule a meeting with myself to accomplish something.” – Jason Belk
    • At the end of the day Jason might put tasks on his calendar to highlight what he completed during the course of a day. The tasks and appointments can be easily exported to show progress and accomplishments over time. It’s great as a way to document work and aggregate it over a quarter or even longer periods. And, it helps us build that narrative we spoke about earlier.

41:52 – Thoughts on Layoffs

• Jason joined Cisco right after the housing crisis of 2008 / 2009. There was a significant layoff right after his joining the team.
  • Jason saw great people with good skills get laid off, and he learned that people can be laid off even if they are doing a good job. Entire divisions may be laid off for business reasons, for example.
  • “I don’t want to be in a position where I’m getting impacted by a layoff and I’m scrambling.” – Jason Belk
  • Seeing the layoffs made Jason first seek to always keep his skills technically relevant to the industry.
    • This is part of the reason Jason went for his CCNA (happened not long after seeing that layoff).
  • Jason also developed a willingness to take on new challenges that are improving the business and a willingness to make changes for teams and companies when it makes sense.
  • As a way to force himself to be open to other jobs ever few years, Jason has a mental mantra of laying himself off every 3 years. In periods of developing expertise from intermediate to advanced or advanced to expert, it’s more like 5 years.
  • “My advice to anyone in a large corporation is be building a plan for yourself both financially with a savings and then from a skills and career and relationship perspective (so) that you’re not surprised if you get the boot and you’re not scrambling on LinkedIn.” – Jason Belk, on layoffs
  • Maintain relationships with people you have worked with over the years. Don’t just come to them when you need something!
    • “Our relationship meant more than just that one job.” – Jason Belk, on maintaining relationships with former co-workers
• Maybe a focus on preparing for these situations can take our mind off thinking about being in those situations
  • Jason recommends we change the narrative from something negative to something positive.
    • Negative narrative – “I might get laid off and lose my job, and that’s frightening.”
    • Positive narrative – “I might get laid off, so I should enjoy it while it lasts and do all I can to continue to grow myself in my career so that if that happens to me, I’m ready to go. I’m not just scrambling because I didn’t know this could possibly happen…I’m learning new skills. I’m connecting with people. I’m adding value to the business. So if they for one reason or another push me out the door I’m hot off the press and ready to rumble.”
• To follow up with Jason on this conversation, you can find him:
  • On LinkedIn
  • On Twitter – @renobelk
  • Jason’s Linktree has links to his GitHub profile, his Cisco U tutorials, videos he has done on YouTube, and information on how to get access to free tutorials.

Mentioned in the Outro

• Jason wrote down his narrative before sharing it verbally. Writing is a thinking process to get us to a more complete thought.
  • Jason used writing to build courses and prepare for presentations.
  • We can build our narrative by communicating our accomplishments in written and verbal form.
• If you find your text messages and social media posts are negative or focused on struggle, maybe it’s time to start journaling with an exercise like morning pages to get those thoughts out for processing in a more private way.

Contact the Hosts

• The hosts of Nerd Journey are John White and Nick Korte.
  • E-mail: [e-mail]
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  • Connect with John on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @vJourneyman
  • Connect with Nick on LinkedIn or DM him on Twitter/X @NetworkNerd_