The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers: Featuring Careers for Women, Trades, and Vets in Tech and Data Centers by Carrie Goetz

Episode Date: February 1, 2025

Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers: Featuring Careers for Women, Trades, and Vets in Tech and Data Centers by Carrie Goetz Amazon.com Carriegoetz.com Here is your golden opportunity! What is a data center? How do they work? The mission-critical industry—also known as the data center industry—is in desperate need of people with critical skills. In fact, there are over 300,000 open jobs right now! This book answers the who, what, where, when, why, and how of data centers in an easily digestible format, explaining: Who has opportunities in this industry (way more than you think) What is a data center, and how does the ecosystem work Where do we find out about scholarships, trade support, veterans' resources, and women's resources When in my career can I start (hint: jobs for non-degreed and degreed professions) Why is this industry important, and why should you consider joining the ranks How do I jumpstart my knowledge and see not if but WHERE I fit in at my desired career level This first-of-its-kind, peer-reviewed book bridges the gap between IT and facilities. It takes a holistic approach to explaining mission-critical data centers, from site selection to the cloud and all things between. Whether your site is hyperscale, colo, cloud, or an on-premises data center, this book covers everything you need to know to find these highly sought-after and lucrative careers. This book showcases over 200 jobs for technical and non-technical seekers, skilled trades, and degreed professionals. Here is what you need to know about topics such as power, sustainability, cooling, site selection, physical security, construction, design considerations, networking, servers, storage, cybersecurity, whitespace management, types of data centers, operations, and the myriad of ways to earn a great living with opportunities for growth. This book will give you the basics to get jumpstarted with a good overall understanding of the pieces, parts, and smarts and how they work together to keep our digital infrastructure working. The data center industry is actively hiring at all skill levels. There are jobs for almost everyone, regardless of your degree. Learn ways to engage and be supported in the industry after you buy the book. (As a bonus, this book also provides a reference for educators.) Reasons to pursue a career in the mission critical industry are: Potential starting salary of over $100,000 Your college debt paid Jobs available everywhere, with or without degrees Also included are these additional sections to help you invest in your journey: Scholarships Certifications Trades Women's resources Veteran resources Buy this book today and jumpstart your career in data centers!About the author Carrie Goetz, Principal/CTO, StrategITcom, personifies over 40 years of global experience designing, running, and auditing, data centers and IT departments. She is an international keynote speaker and is globally published in 69 countries in over 250 publications.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hey folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Jim and the Iron Lady sings, and that makes it official. Welcome to the show. We're going to be talking to her about her

latest book called Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers, featuring careers for women, trades, and vets in tech and data centers. We'll be talking about a couple of other books as well. Carrie Goetz joins us on the show today. We're going to be getting into it with her and her insights and how you can make your life better. She is the principal and CTO of Strategicom and Amazon's best-selling author of Jumpstart Your Career and Data Center, featuring careers for women, trades, and vets in tech and data centers. She personifies over 40 years of global experience designing, running, and auditing data centers, IT departments departments and intelligent

buildings welcome to the show carrie how are you thanks i'm doing great thanks how are you i am excellent thanks for coming give us your dot coms where do you want people to go to find you on the interwebs oh so kerrygetz.com or strategiccom.com or of course good old linkedin i'm on all three of those. Got to love the LinkedIn. So give us your 30,000 overview. What's inside your new book, The Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers? So data centers, if you don't know what they are, are big buildings that house all of our computing stuff. We all have personas in a data center.

We all live in a data center. Most of us live in multiple data centers, whether you know it or not. And so the idea with the book is to let people know all the different types of jobs or, you know, at least a good chunk. There's about 300 in the book, I think. And how data centers work, how to get involved, where to get scholarships, resources, all the good things to get involved in the industry. What's a data center officially? How is that defined? A data center officially is a place that stores all of our computing information,

all of our data, and the building that surrounds it with the environmentals, power, cooling, all that kind of good stuff that keeps it running. So if you really want to get technical, your cell phone could sort of be considered a data center, right? It has power. It has connectivity to the outside world. It has computing capabilities and it has storage capabilities. That's what data centers are. They have all of those things just in a much grander scale than your phone. And what makes them such an interesting place to work or advantageous in the thing for your book, Jumpstarting Your Career, and people, either women, trades, and vets? Why is this really helpful to them and beneficial, I guess?

I think historically, this has been sort of a male-dominated industry. A lot of the tech industries kind of are, and we really don't highlight the jobs for women and girls, even though there's plenty of those. I mean, we have everything from construction to the cloud and all things in between. So there's jobs for everybody with and without a degree. You can get involved without a degree. You can have those companies pay for your degree if you choose to go on and get a degree. But, you know, if you look at the Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft of the world, they've dropped that degree requirement for a lot of their jobs because we have a lot of jobs that don't necessarily require one. And the nice thing

for featuring a lot of the careers for women is there's a lot of women out there that are a year shy of a degree or six months shy of a semester because they dropped out to be caregivers or do something else. But they're still absolutely very viable people in the workforce. And honestly, technology changes so fast, you're going to be continuously learning anyway. Yeah. I mean, you have to go through training too. Sure. There's a lot of job training. We're working on some national apprenticeship programs right now to help people get involved from an apprenticeship level that'll be through the Department of

Education. So the cool thing is, you know, if you're young and for whatever reason, college is not in your purview, either financially, you're just not ready for it. You got a family to raise, whatever that is, there's jobs out there for you. And then you can move on and do that later if you want, but this gives you the resources to find those jobs. I'm glad they're dumping it because I've, I've had people come out of college that went to college that I can't like, for instance, with sales, a lot of times we try and hire for sales out of college They can't sell their way out of paperback because sales is something you kind of have to learn in real life As far as my opinion is concerned, you know and other things too. I mean a lot of stuff can really be taught

You know, you don't you don't need to learn history. I mean history is important You do need to learn that I'm just to survive in life and understand how the world works in human nature but you know i mean you don't really need it to do your job personally unless you're you know a historian i suppose you might need it for that we need those too yeah you need those too but i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of this work that's rudimentary and can be easily taught and, you know, you don't need to, you really don't need that. Yeah. Without a doubt. And you grow as you learn.

And plus, you know, if you think about it, my degrees are so old, they're, you know, powdered at this point, but technology changes. So you're going to learn all kinds of new stuff. And honestly, that's part of the thing that I really enjoy about this industry as a whole is that it's always changing. There's always something new to learn.

But, you know, whatever path you choose, choose one that's going to make you happy. And, you know, that was a big part of writing the book was I wanted to make sure that it could be digested in a weekend. So people could go out there and read, figure out what all the different careers are and how they work. And then that does a few things. One, it introduces them. So people could go out there and read, figure out what all the different careers are and how they work. And then that does a few things. One, it introduces them. Two, if you're going to go on an interview for a job, you now at least have something you can talk in an educated manner about, right? And to help highlight those.

So I think, you know, it helps on a lot of fronts. But I would encourage people, if you think that you have to be technical to be in this industry, you don't, if you think you have to write code, you don't, you know, there's so many ways to get involved that, that have nothing to do with, with college. Yeah. It's, it's in people can learn a lot of stuff. You know, the one thing I learned a long time ago, there's no corner on who has the best ideas. Everyone can contribute and everyone can be part of this. And imagine, you know, you angle this, title this to vets and people in the trade business. I mean, there's lots of different variations of jobs that are in a tech and data center. It's not like you don't have to necessarily know computers. Knowing computers

helps, I guess. But I mean, there's all sorts of different work levels in tech and data centers that need to be done. You know, somebody's got to be the janitor sometimes, too. Not just that. They've got to be built. We have all the construction trades. So it has to be built when you're doing a moving heavy equipment. We need people, diesel mechanics, to help fix that heavy equipment.

But it's definitely broad-ranging. And so I really encourage, you know, one thing we kind of do wrong, I think, in this country is when we introduce students to tech, it's through coding, right? All the little kids get a little coding program. Coding is a very specific skill. You're either good at it or you're not. Nobody wants bad coders coding anything because their code will be awful. So if that's not your jam, move on and find a different jam, right? But the problem is that people equate coding with technology and don't realize that it's this big of it. Now, don't have to tell a coder that because they all think they're way more. But really, coding is a very, very small part of the industry.

There's a million things around there. So if it's not your jam, just look around. You'll find something else. If it's not your jam, look around and find something else. I probably just called how old I am with that phrase, too. But hey, you know. You and me. You and me.

I'm going back to Welcome Back Carter, I think, right now or something. We're going to do the jam. Let's talk about your other two books. You have two other books you have offered on your website. Tell us about those, and I'll let you decide which one to do first. Okay, so we'll start with an educator's reference, right? That's fun. So teachers that are teaching coding classes, construction classes, trades classes, ROTC, technology related, the educator's reference helps you add data centers

to that. So now you can teach not only the code, but you can teach where the code lives and help people understand that. So it's got all kinds of classroom experiments, things you can do as an educator to add that to your trades classes, all that kind of thing. And then Polly Packett is Polly Packett's precious payload is a kid's book that talks about a little girl sending a picture to her grandma to make her feel better and how it travels the internet and gets to a data center for her grandma to pick up later. So kids can be introduced because we know most kids figure out what they want to be

when they grow up by the time they're seven or eight they've never been exposed they're going to have to fall into the industry as opposed to decide to go into the industry there you go so you're trying to get more people involved in stem it sounds like is that it is absolutely yeah so right now just in the mission critical industry we have 300,000 open jobs that have to be filled this year. And that's not counting all the new load from AI. So it's a lot. So you hope that inspires young people to get involved with tech and different things like that, I guess. Absolutely.

And the big thing is really just to introduce the depth and breadth, right? So if I say I'm a person, a young person, and I'm trying to figure out what I want to do and I want to travel the world, I've got 4 million miles on one airline doing data centers all over the planet. What a great way to do that, right? If you really enjoy sales and marketing, here's a way to go do sales and marketing. But, hey, here's an understanding of the industry so you can be better at that sales and marketing.

And so the idea here is just to kind of build the whole data center thing is an ecosystem. Everything has to live and work together and play together well on the playground. And this just kind of outlines all of those. And then how much better are you going to be at your job if you understand everything around you? You know, now when those conversations pop up, you don't, you're not sitting there like a deer in the headlights because you don't understand. You at least have enough knowledge to know what they're talking about, how it fits in with what you're doing, and you can participate, which opens up more doors all the way around. The more doors you can have open, the better. So what are some of the services

you provide there on your website? What are some of the things that you do for people? I notice you've got Fractional CTO. Do you offer that as service on your website? We do, yeah. So core business, we have CTO as a service where we go and help companies of all different sizes, whether they need somebody to help them get through a project, load up their IT stack. They don't have enough money for a full-time CTO, but they need those services to make sure that they do it right. So we do that fractionally for several companies and help them get on that path. And we have repeat customers and that's a good chunk of it. And then I do a lot of technical writing.

It's a big chunk of the business, yeah. Now, one of the, flipping back to your book, Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers, a lot of these data centers pay really well because I guess they're in tech. You have here, it's a potential starting salary of over 100 grand. Absolutely, yeah. And I think that's one of the cool things too

when you bring in all the trades. A lot of these, an electrician can become an electrician through an apprenticeship program, end up making $150,000 a year with zero college debt. Think about that. Right. And the same thing happens with the construction trades and all the other trades. There's so many ways to get involved. And I think it's really about opening the doors for years and years in this country. We've pushed everybody just to the educational system. You know, you're not going to be anything if you don't go to college which is garbage by the way we all know educated idiots so let's just put that on the table but but there's more than one path to get there right if you're super good with your hands if you're neurodiverse not everybody learns the same way some people that had a really bad high school experience

would rather gouge their eyes out with a spoon than they had go to college. But that doesn't mean that they have nothing to offer society, right? And I think that real innovation happens when we take those people that are really good with their hands and put it with an engineer. You put those two people together, you get a very different outcome. If you take everybody and put them through college and say, here's a problem, here's how you solve it, you've just killed innovation. Innovation happens when you get all of those minds together with all of the collective backgrounds and different experiences

and have them go solve a problem. You're going to get a very different outcome. Yeah, you definitely are. And if you can avoid the college debt thing, I mean, I watch the Ramsey show on TikTok. It'll come up on me. And, geez, the amount of people. Like, there was a guy the other day.

I think he was a chiropractor, and he had $460,000 in college debt. And Dave Ramsey, I think it's Dave, he asked him, he goes, do you know chiropractors? He goes, do you know how many chiropractors operate at that level he goes maybe one percent he goes you better be one percent it's crazy and i think that we've done just such a huge disservice shoving everybody into that college model and look at that except for the college right except for the college sure yeah that's how i got a great service for their bottom line. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, there's so many different ways to learn, and I think we have to embrace that. And we need to embrace all of those different pathways because, honestly, you just unlock so much when you give people the freedom to learn.

One of the best management books I ever read was If It Ain't Broke, Break It. I'm paraphrasing, but this was, this company rewarded people for busting stuff. Whatever you can find in our systems, our processes or whatever, if you break it and have a solution to that, then we reward you. And they became a better company, right? It wasn't, don't tell anybody we did that wrong. We don't know. Tell everybody we did that wrong no no tell everybody we did that wrong how we fixed it yeah a good example is you know when you innovate and you eat your own lunch excuse me there's a famous example of i believe was kodak who'd come up with digital photography

but if they they knew that if they brought it to market it would cannibalize their polaroid sales you know and being able, you know, and being able to, you know, the photo mats and all that developing that they would do. And so they didn't. And so eventually someone else did and they went bankrupt eventually. On the other hand, you have Apple Macs, you know, where Mac used to be, the Macintosh computer used to be their number one bread and butter. And then they developed internally the iPad.

And then, like, if we put out this iPad, it's probably going to kind of cannibalize our Mac sales, which it did. Or somebody else can be us the market. So if there's anybody who's going to cannibalize ourselves, I guess it's going to be us. It's going to be us, right? So, you know, if you don't innovate, innovate or die, as they say, I believe. It is. It is. My friend.

So you've got to get into that. You've got to do that. You've got to make that an importance thing in what you do. With the Educators Reference for Data Center Education, how does that work? Is that if you're a trainer at the data center or Educators Reference for Data Center Education? It was really written for teachers a lot of that when i started working with teachers and calling in and talking to classrooms and that kind of stuff one of the things that the teacher said is look we don't we don't have curriculum for this we don't know how

to do that and so curriculum if you don't know is a very very slow moving machine not only that but they make you i have colleges that use my book. And so I have to do a new revision of that book every two years because you have to keep it up to date. And then nobody can sell other copies at the used bookstore, I think is part of it, but that's between me and you talking. But anyway, but curriculum is a very, very slow moving machine. And so the idea is we're not going to be able to set up a curriculum for data centers because it's going to take too long. And by then the need is butchered. So the idea is, hey, look, here's your trades class.

Here's your coding class. Here's your marketing class, your pre-engineering, whatever you're doing. And this is how it applies to a data center. So it works with the jumpstart your career in data centers. It goes through all the things. Here's the key takeaways. Here's key things for your life. There's one in there that talks about, all right, here's your students. Let's talk about what your environmental footprint is for Snapchat. How many snaps do you send a day times? How many people in this classroom times?

Number of days of year, weeks of the year. How much power does it take to send one snap? Now let's look what our classroom does. And I think that does a lot of things because we know that data centers are going to be about 10% of power consumption worldwide very soon. Why don't we teach people how to be better stewards of that? How to be better stewards? We teach them how to recycle. We teach them how to pick the right cardboard container. We teach them how to, you know, to pick the right cardboard container. We teach all that, but we don't teach them to do that digitally. So this is a way to take all of those classes and all of those subjects that have things that are applicable and add it to it. And you can use it for scouts, coding, technical merit badges, you know, anything where you're trying to teach tech,

but the idea is just to pull out and make it easy for the teacher. I have some people that send me stuff on Snapchat, but I have turned the phone around trying to figure out which way is up or down. That's my Snapchat just call back. Yeah. I always tell people, I'm like, hey, I got your photo on Snapchat, and I'm trying to figure out which way is up on this, and is that a thing going down or up?

What is that? So anyway, that's my Snapchat joke. Callback jokes on The Chris Foss Show. There's plenty of them. So what haven't we talked about that we want to tease out to people to have them get to know you better and, of course, order the books and your services online? Oh, so let's touch on the children's book just a little bit.

Okay. If you have a school, a class, a library, any of those places, we really would like that book to be in there because it's a way for the kids to get a first basic understanding of the internet, not here's a device, use it, but here's a device and it's how you interact with it and it's how things travel and how they map through. So all of that, I think is super cool. Plus it opens up a lot of career opportunities for kids, too. Yeah. I mean, we want more people to get jobs, more careers.

We need more people to work or want to work if they want to work, I suppose. You know, the hype for AI right now, right? AI is in a data center. AI lives in data centers. If you're going to interact with AI, you're interacting with a data center. So you can do that. So give us your final thoughts as we go out. Tell people where they can find you on the dot coms, and we'll take it from there.

So kerrygetz.com is probably the easiest one. It's got links to the books. It also has links out to the company website. Strategicom.com is the company website. And, of course, good old LinkedIn. If you are an educator in the tech space or the trade space and you want somebody to come, you know, dial in, zoom in to talk to your classroom, please reach out. I do it all the time. It's a great way just to have an introduction to students. Matter of fact, I'm doing one tonight, actually. Yeah, I encourage you to get involved. And if you are a company that's in this space, we can custom print a first page on that book that you can

use for marketing activities to we try to make it because it's important to know not just what the jobs are but the companies that are hiring and then we put those out on the website to as resources so people know where to go look for jobs it's been fun and insightful to have you on the show thank you very much Carrie yeah thanks Chris had a great time thank you and thanks for honest for tuning in go to goodreads.com, Fortune's Chris Voss. Pick up her book, wherever fine books are sold. You can pick up the first one we talked about,

Jumpstart Your Career in Data Centers, featuring careers for women, trades, and vets in tech and data centers. You want to get involved in technology because it's really advancing, especially in the field, like we mentioned, of AI. It's really crazy right now um yeah the the new deep seek thing that just came out that just blew up 600 million dollars and a billion dollars and yeah yeah it's kind of there's room for everybody there's room for everybody i'm sure that i'm sure uh some fat cat trillionaire who sits on the market all day long you You know, he, he might have to skip McDonald's this week or something.

I don't know. He'll, he'll live anyway. Right now, somebody in the audience is going to me. Anyway. Thanks for tuning in. Go to good reads.com. For just Christmas, LinkedIn.com. For just Christmas.

Christmas. One of the tick tock and the all is crazy. Place the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe or else. Don't make me come back to our kids. See you next time. Thanks.