It has been a while since I've used my public speaking skills. It was hard to get back into gear. It was also hard to temper my own expectations. I liken it to an athlete who has been is coming out of retirement and his hoping to hit a home run on their first at bat. I should be happy with a double or a triple. Nevertheless, I have given some amazing speeches in my life, and it is intoxicating to have a crowd sitting in the palm of your hand. I remember two speeches I gave when Jane Addams Middle School was opening and I was the PTSA President. Jane Addams was going to hold the APP program (for gifted students) NE Seattle, which means these were some of the most intense parents in the Pacific Northwest. In the first one speech the spring before the school opened, I told a packed auditorium of anxious middle school parents that "opening a new school has a thousand moving parts" and the principal is doing her best to keep on op of everything. In other words, I very politely told 600 parents to back the fuck off and let the principal do her job.
The second speech kind of had the same tone. This speech was three days before the first day of school. I told everyone to be kind, for in three days everyone in the building would be on their first day at a new job or their first day at a new school. Some parents wept.
No one cried at the Apprenti graduation, but that is okay. The speech was vetted by the Apprenti team and they thought I have a compelling story, even though as times I thought I sounded like an affluent white woman bemoaning her existence.
Here is the speech as written, in case you are curious.
____________________________
I am Lauren McGuire and I graduated from the Apprenti program last year. I am also a recovering politician and when Sasha asked me if I wanted to speak I’m like yeah, of course. Do you know how long it has been since I’ve held microphone in front a crowd? Been awhile.
First, congratulations to the new Apprenti graduates! It is a lot of work and is quite the accomplishment.
Today I am going to talk about my experience with Apprenti and what it has meant to me. I was one of the pioneers/guinea pigs of the program, which was fun. I am now an Information Analyst.
Before I start, I have a few questions.
How many of you is this your second, third or fourth job in different area or field? You don’t need to be an apprentice to raise your hand. Maybe you were a weather specialist for the army and now you are working for Amazon Web Services? Looking at different clouds?
Now, how many of you have some prior formal education or job training that is completely different than what you are doing now?
Great, thanks. Like many of you here, I had a lot of different experiences before I joined Apprenti.
Before I found Apprenti, I was a stay-at-home mom for seventeen years.
Before that, I worked at Ernst & Young where I did compensation consulting and organizational change management. Before that, I worked in a strategic marketing consulting firm. All of those jobs required decent amount of travel which was not compatible with motherhood.
I went to Northwestern University where my first major was undecided. Then I got a double major in History and Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences. The I got a Masters degree in Communication. As you can see, I was all over the place. As Sasha says, I have very expensive brain.
While I was a stay-at-home mom, I was really involved in community service. When my son was in kindergarten, Seattle Public schools was experiencing tremendous growth and so I got involved with group of parents who advocated to the district to open new schools to meet the demand. That was when I got hooked. I loved that kind of work. I later became president of the City-wide PTSA where I did a lot of education advocacy. I worked with teachers, parents, students, principals, the school board, the superintendent and State legislators. Great experience.
In 2015, some friends and some people I didn’t like very much told me I should run for school board here in Seattle. So I ran and lost but it was great experience and I learned a lot and I met a lot of really interesting people.
So what was next? I was tired of volunteering, my kids were getting older and wanted a real job, something with a paycheck.
All of friends were like “Oh Lauren you are so smart and nice and have such great experience…you can do whatever you want!” and I believed them. I applied for one job at UW that was leading an organizational change project for their accounting department. The role required working with a variety of stakeholders. My friends were like “Oh my god you’d be perfect for that!” But didn’t get that job. Or the next job. Or the next job. My friends, amazing as they are, are not leading HR departments in Seattle. Finding a just turned out to be a lot harder than I thought.
It was very, very, very humbling. I didn’t have a straight, linear career that I could hop back into. I wasn’t a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant. Instead, I did whatever I found interesting.
Still, I wanted to get back to work. My friend Julia organized this group for moms wishing to return to the work force and that was when I found Apprenti.
Sasha set me up for an interview with Lief. I was very grateful he hired me for a job that I had no idea what it was about. He told me his group provided an enterprise wide service desk solution and I had no idea what that meant. Not. A. Clue. You’ve seen those Charlie Brown cartoons where the adults talk and they sound like “wah-wah-wah-wah”? It was like that. Accepting the job was an act of pure faith.
Lief was a very supportive manager and believed in the Apprenti program. In the interview, I asked him why he wanted to hire someone from Apprenti andhe said “I am looking for someone who can think.” I can do that.
Learning the new skills was challenging. It wouldn’t say it was hard, but it was like drinking from a firehose—a lot, all at once, coming fast and hard. It could be intimidating at times.
It was just as important to have supportive peers, which were a lot harder to come by. My peers had been working in the field for a long time and in comes this new person with no direct experience. Two of my peers really didn’t like me and they didn’t understand why I was there. I think they thought I was a charity case, and they were kind of right. As you could tell by the first part of my speech, I don’t really have a small ego. I had my friends constantly telling me how great I was and these people were like "Why are you here?" Again, this was very, very humbling.
Fortunately, I was an analyst for a developer who was very helpful and supportive both technically and emotionally as I was dealing with some of the tensions from my other peers.
So that is how I got here. But what I have I learned? What insights have I gained?
One of the primary insights that came to me was when Sasha had invited me and a handful of other apprentices to a meeting with a potential donor. We all went around the room and talked about how we got to the program. Another woman had worked in sales. Another guy was an officer in the military. Brain had been a Project Manager with the Army Corp of Engineers.
I was listening to Brian, and I thought, as soon as Microsoft learns that this guy was a project manager, he is going to be running the show. Then I had an epiphany listening to the other people talk: I had thought that not being from tech was a liability. It turns out, that was an advantage. Once I got the core skills of my job down, my other skills came back into bloom.
Here are a few examples:
· Lief asked me to run a meeting once for the first time. He said wow that was a great meeting! You are really good at this! I’ve been a PTA President, I’ve run lots of meetings.
· Our team is working with another team where we are going in and are going to “fix” their process. On the one hand, they are happy about it, and the other hand us coming in and fixing their process means they were doing it wrong before so now they are getting a little prickly. How can we get them on board and still move the work forward so they don’t become a blocker? Get people to do things they don’t want to do and make them feel good about itis part of organizational change management. That’s what I did in my life as an education advocate and when I was at Ernst & Young.
· Some of the things I’m good at, too, do not require my expensive brain, as Sasha calls it. One of the senior managers in the company was having two people who weren’t getting along so he swung by my desk and asked for advice. I’m a mom of two kids. Two people not getting along is my bread and butter.
I hope you look for those other skills you have from your past life and bring them to your new role. If I haven’t convinced you, then I highly recommend you all read this book. “Range: Why Generalist Triumph in a Specialized World” by David Epstein.
This is from the book jacket: "Epstein discovered that in most fields—especially those that are complex and unpredictable—generalists, not specialists, are primed to excel.Generalists often find their path late, and they juggle many interests rather than focusing on just one. They’re also more creative, more agile and able to see connections their more specialized peers can’t see."
This is you.
This is me.
This is us.
This is Apprenti.
[When I said this, everyone clapped like I was done, and I wasn’t expecting it. I still had more to go. I should have just said thank you and gotten off the stage.]
When I read this book, I thought of Apprenti and my own experience. Now that you all have finished your on-the-job training, of course you will need to continue to work on your tech skills. But in that process, remember all of the other wonderful skills you bring to the table.
Congratulations!
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