Not a Straight Line: Breaking Into Tech and Rising to Leadership скачать в хорошем качестве

Not a Straight Line: Breaking Into Tech and Rising to Leadership

On International Women’s Day, we had the pleasure of hosting Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn for an honest and inspiring conversation about breaking into tech, building a career in cloud, growing into leadership, and navigating confidence, community, and personal growth along the way. Shannon shared her non-traditional path into tech — from DJing to help desk, infrastructure, Azure, Microsoft, and now working with enterprise customers as a principal-level technical leader. This session was also an open conversation with the community, covering real questions about networking, imposter syndrome, leadership, personal branding, application security, learning in public, and how to stay focused while building your career. This was a relaxed and authentic discussion designed to help more women see that there is no single “perfect” path into technology — only the path you build with discipline, curiosity, and consistency. In this webinar, we discussed: Shannon’s journey from DJing into technology Building a career in cloud and infrastructure without a traditional computer science background How to break into tech when you are just getting started Why personal branding and community matter How meetups and networking can open real opportunities The difference between being a strong individual contributor and becoming a leader Why “soft skills” are often the hardest skills to learn Leadership, delegation, and managing people Imposter syndrome and how to keep moving anyway Transitioning into new areas like application security Learning in public through blogs, projects, GitHub, and hands-on building How AI can support learning, growth, and leadership development Why perfection is not the goal — progress is Key message from the session You do not need a perfect background, a perfect portfolio, or a perfect plan to grow in tech. What matters is staying curious, building consistently, asking questions, learning publicly, and giving yourself permission to grow. About Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn Shannon Eldridge-Kuehn is a cloud and technology leader with deep experience across infrastructure, Azure, security, identity, platform engineering, and enterprise customer engagement. She previously worked at Microsoft and continues to be a strong advocate for community, mentorship, and helping others grow in tech. About our initiative This conversation is part of our effort to create more access, visibility, and support for women building in cloud, infrastructure, security, and engineering. We believe talent is everywhere, but access, confidence, and community still need to be intentionally built. If this conversation resonated with you, let us know in the comments: What part of Shannon’s story or advice stood out to you the most? Like, comment, and subscribe to support more conversations like this. #WomenInTech #CloudComputing #Leadership #TechCareers #Azure #AWS #AppSec #DevOps #PersonalBranding #Mentorship #InternationalWomensDay