Making a career move

If you've arrived here via the @AvayaData twitter account, welcome!  :-)

After lengthy deliberation, last week I made the decision to leave my current employer (Avaya) and take-up an opportunity to evolve my career in a new direction.

This wasn't an easy decision to make.  My 'serious' career began back in 1994 when I joined what was then Northern Telecom, and which later evolved to become Nortel.  Following the demise of this once grand company, the division I worked for was acquired by Avaya at the end of 2009.  That makes 17.5 years of career evolution within essentially the same company!

The downfall of Nortel was a terribly sad thing to witness first hand.  The heady days of the year 2000 were cruelly cast into memory as the company shrank from almost 100,000 employees down to little more than 20,000.  The rounds of redundancies ran into the teens during the decade that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble.  As one of my colleagues put it, it was like working against a constant headwind, and don't get me started on the stock price!

What was so hard to square as an employee through all this was the fact - and it is a fact - that Nortel had excellent technology and innovation leadership in its markets, particularly in the data networking product line, on which I focused the majority of my time in the company (I'm glad to say that technology lives on and is evolving within Avaya today).  The technology was certainly never the reason for the demise.  Acres of articles have been written on this topic, so I'll leave it there.  Let's just say I remain very proud to have worked for that great company.

One of those oft-debated topics is how often one should ideally change companies.  17 years with the same employer is a rare thing indeed in this post 'job for life' era.  For me it's all about maintaining career development, and Nortel gave me the opportunity to make three step changes, from manufacturing support through IT and finally into presales. No wonder I stuck around.

Finally, I've had the privilege to work with some extremely talented, friendly, supportive and professional colleagues during my years at Nortel and Avaya, without whom the experience would have been much less enjoyable.  The people make the company, and to be honest it's a lot tougher saying goodbye to the people than it is the company.  Of course it's easy to keep in touch these days, and we have so many options for doing so, but we all know the reality is that it's never quite the same once you leave.  Ah well, so be it.  You've got to break some eggs to make an omelette.

So now the time has come to take a bold step from big vendor to small vendor, from large multinational corporation to feisty, ambitious niche player.  And it's also time to move my career on to its next phase as well.  For a while now I've been eyeing a move into Technical Product Marketing, and that's exactly what I'll be doing next.  I'll post more about that another time.

Once I've started in the new company I'll be setting up a new Twitter account as that's proven a powerful and enjoyable way to build a virtual community of people who share a common interest.  For those of you who've joined me on the @AvayaData journey (and there are 622 of you at the time of writing), please be assured I'll be handing that account to a worthy successor who I'm sure will keep things interesting.  I'd love you to join me at my new account if you've enjoyed my tweets.  I'm moving to another networking vendor, so it'll still be industry-relevant stuff.  Details will follow in a subsequent posting here.

I'll close with a quote from a 'Congratulations' card I received from my Mum.  It's by a lady called Helen Keller...

"Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing"