Industry Expert / Executive Interview Exploring Career Paths and Industry Trends

 

Flavio Cervantes

CST 300

February 5, 2025

The interview regarding Industry Expert Interview – Exploring Career Paths and Industry Trends entailed interviewing Aaron Vines, his job title is “supervisor at Inland Empire Health Plan”. The reason why I selected this person is because he has extensive experience in the IT industry, at one point of his career he was a director at a managed service provider, and is now a supervisor for an IT department at his current job role. He also is very intelligent in a technical manner, many colleagues, including myself go up to him for guidance. He has a great understanding on how technology works with respect to software and hardware.

Key takeaways from these conversations are the career advice he provided by explaining that sometime we can start our careers doing something unrelated to the final career we finally chose. He started as a banker, and is now in IT management industry. This reminds us it is a marathon, not a race.   Another moment that was important was when Aaron stated that it academic journeys take time and one should not focus on achieving it overnight, but to slowly work on it over time. This process takes time, one should focus on the long-term achievements and the opportunities a degree provides in advancing oneself career by applying to new careers to continue challenging ourselves.  Another technical challenge that Aaron described is how working in the IT field requires to constantly upkeep with all the emerging technological trends, advancements and improvements within the industry. If one is able to keep up with the new technology, it will provide essential skills and understanding to utilizing cutting edge technology in enterprises to ensure their success. Vise versa, if one does not learn the new technologies and stays stagnant, one will fall behind with respect to understanding cutting-edge innovations.

How this experience influenced my understanding of career options is by reminding me that career options are always evolving, one day we can have a certain focus, the next we can shift it over to another respective trade. While this may seem like a negative factor, it can be positive if one uses their initial career experiences to build their expertise as they progress in their career.

How I plan to apply this knowledge in my professional journey improve my communication skills by working on communication with my peers, colleagues, vendors, supplier, and management. This ensures that there is healthy workflow established with other. It also establishes a trust and reliability in the work field because the reflection we output via our trust, reliability and work ethic is extremely valuable for professional development. The future steps for my academic journey will involve to keep improving critical thinking skills, I will achieve this by pursuing learning new technologies & computer science trends. These are important factors to consistently work on because as technology emerges, one is more valuable asset if they can work with that respective tech which can be achieved and utilize flexible critical thinking skills.

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