My career journey leading up to Microsoft

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My career journey leading up to Microsoft
Posted by denglishbi on September 29, 2022
I thought I would do a short post outlining my career journey up to the point where I finally was hired and accepted a position to join Microsoft❤️I will try and keep it brief because along the way I could highlight lots of stories regarding the people, companies, and customers I have worked with which would get lengthy????
My first big job coming out of college was at a casino in Minnesota (where I have always lived) that my oldest sister referred me to. I graduated with a Finance degree with Accounting and Economic minors and the position was in the Revenue Audit department (got to audit the daily gaming revenue numbers which included slots, blackjack, pull tabs, and bingo). I really got interested in technology here, not that I hadn’t used computers prior since my dad was a computer programmer, but I started to get into MS Access (Office 2.0) which led me down the path of eventually getting recruited by the IT Department.
In the IT Department I worked with MS Access, FoxPro, Visual Basic, SQL Server, Oracle, SharePoint, and a few more technologies like DataStage and ProClarity just to name a couple more. My passion was always around the Microsoft technologies and in particular the data and reporting side which led me down the path of data warehousing and business intelligence. I still remember using loading data into SQL Server OLAP Services and slicing and dicing the gaming revenue numbers, it was amazing????
From the casino I was recruited into the consulting world and I will admit that was a scary transition because I had worked at the casino for over 10 years and was very comfortable there. I worked for two different consulting companies over another 10 year stretch that both focused on Microsoft technologies and I got an opportunity to work with lots of different customers and projects, it was a great experience and it was stressful at times when all of the eyes are on you and you are being looked to for all of the answers – hopefully you have built a good internal network and can leverage others when you are stuck or have a question. I have lots of great stories I could go over, but will save them to discuss over a cold one sometime off the record????
During the consulting years I also helped run the local Minnesota SQL Server User Group, Minnesota BI User Group, PASS Business Analytics Virtual Group, and helped with some of the Minnesota SQLSaturday events. I also did a lot of presentations, helped out in the Microsoft forums, tech edited books, got to co-author a book and was a Microsoft Data Platform MVP. Also during this time I coached my son’s soccer and helped coach his basketball (spending time with the kids was one of those things that I didn’t want to miss out on and the reason I stayed away from a job that required travel).
Eventually I decided to leave consulting and move back to a full-time position at a company. I worked for two different companies over the next 5 years and the last job prior to joining Microsoft is the one that got me the hands-on real-world experience with Azure and the Microsoft cloud technologies. Sure I had dabbled in the cloud a bit being a Microsoft MVP, but using it at a large enterprise is a different story and glad I got that opportunity before joining Microsoft.
My Speaker Background slide screenshot
So now if you see this slide, or one similar, during one of my presentations maybe this post will shed a little light on my journey going from the business world into the land of data warehousing and business intelligence and to the current position at Microsoft (what a dream, I am a huge #MicrosoftAdvocate and #MicrosoftNerd).
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