A New Project – The “Beyond Tech Skills” Podcast

I’m very excited to announce a new project that I’ve been working on for a few months now, the “Beyond Tech Skills” podcast.

If you follow my blog you’ve probably noticed that I haven’t published in a while now. I have things to write about but I simply can’t find the time and brain availability to do so. There are a few new projects I’m working on and they take up all of my focus. Today I’d like to announce one of them.

Some Background

If you follow me you know that I like listening to podcasts. I even wrote a blog post about this a while ago. In the last few years, I’ve also been getting into some soft skills topics. I wrote a blog post about interviewing a DBA, I have presented a session about interviewing and being interviewed (this week at RMOUG Training Days, and in the future as well), and in my Becoming a Consultant blog series I write about soft skills quite a lot.

A few months ago, I talked with Jim Czuprynski, and together we came up with the podcast idea. We get along really well, we both like to talk (a lot!) and we thought it would be a fun experience.

Both Jim and I are Oracle ACE Directors. I met him a few years ago at Oracle Open World as part of an ACE program dinner, and he is one of the main reasons I got promoted from ACE to ACE Director. We’ve both been around in the tech industry for quite some time (me since 1996, and Jim, well, I don’t want to disclose his age, so let’s just say that he’s been part of the tech industry a bit longer than I have).

We planned a few episodes and started recording in late 2020. After recording our first few episodes we decided that it’s something that we really like and would like to pursue, and here we are.

What is it About?

When we talked about creating a podcast, we didn’t want to create a technical podcast. We decided to go in a different direction and focus on things related to the tech world, but “around” technology. So we’ve decided to call the podcast “Beyond Tech Skills” and talk about the anything in the tech world, except tech.

The topic of job interviews came to mind first, since I had a post about it already and I’ve presented a session about interviews, and Jim is helping USA veterans with interviews when getting into their civil lives. The result is a series of episodes about technical interviews. We are talking about the writing and reading of resumes, preparing for an interview, the interview itself and so on, from both the interviewer and the candidate’s perspectives.

We decided to take the following few episodes in a different direction, and talk about diversity in tech. Gender and minorities are things we would like to cover, but any related topic might be part of it as well.

We are now recording the diversity episodes and it’s really an amazing experience (as Kellyn Gorman, our first guest tweeted).

How and When to Listen

Now we are officially launching the podcast. We released the first episode a couple of weeks ago, so podcast distributors should know about us already. If you have a podcast app, simply search “Beyond Tech Skills” and you should be able to find it. Don’t forget to subscribe!

Besides that we have a website where you can listen to the episodes as well: https://beyondtechskills.com. It’s a bit basic but we are still working on that.

I also added a page about it here on my website.

And last, we have a twitter account for the podcast: @BeyondTechSkill (without the S at the end because of twitter limitations)

A new episode will be released every other Wednesday.

We are looking forward to hearing your comments and suggestions; any medium works (comments here or on the podcast, LinkedIn, Twitter, or whatever you prefer).

Hope you like it!