I asked a friend earlier yesterday what the next year was about in the Chinese new year. I was informed it was the snake, and that it was focused around “Transformation”. I’d have to say that this fits the new year for me in 2025 and my current goals.
When I started this journey about 7 years ago, I was just an automation engineer, hoping to build toward a career. it was almost 16 years ago that my first IT job ended with my boss telling me, “You don’t have the mental capability to work in this industry.” That still echos in my ears each day. I worry continually if I’m “enough” or if I can cut it.
Now I’m a Director, and will soon have engineers that I have to manage and work to help grow, develop and treat with the same kindness, and care that I was given and allowed when I restarted my career after this statement 16 years ago. I find it interesting that the pains that hurt us the most in the past still set in and sit with us further and further into a career where people want me to succeed. This past year, I was able to get a couple things done, that most thought were impossible by growing partnerships, certifications, and passing several audits. Now this year in 2025 I, like many others need to figure out how to fit in AI into my work style, and use it to move faster, smarter, and harder. I find AI to be very curious still at this time. It’s going to be a major player in 2025 as it was in 2024, but I think many enterprises are working on much different challenges.
Security is still a major issue, with me reading news reals about how foreign powers are hacking into our own government systems, as well as the usual day to day headlines about another company befallen to a hack. Broadcom has disrupted the hypervisor field and every enterprise is asking, “do we stay with VMware? or do we move to a different one?” and with even more changes and challenges from VMC on AWS, and other options, I see 2025 to continue those questions and new hypervisors to take more of the market. I mentioned AI is a curious piece right now, but one thing is sure, there are many tools built with AI that we will see adopted in 2025, from app-dev scripting support, to data analyzation and presentation to computer vision and more. Some quantify these AI solutions as “legacy” AI but with LLMs growing in adoption as well as hypervisors adopting the services even more, I see utilization of these services growing exponentially in 2025.
As for myself, I mentioned that I will be learning a whole new subset of skills around being a manager, and helping people grow as I have been helped to grow myself. But here is the quick list of what I want to do personally in 2025
- Need to renew my professional AWS certification
- Need to start growing partnerships with a different cloud provider
- Time to certify in a different cloud (Microsoft? Google? Oracle?)
- I plan on doing the GenAI bootcamp with Andrew Brown and learning how to build solutions with these toolsets
- Outside of the GenAI bootcamp, I want to learn how these new AI solutions can work for enterprises and grow adoption
- I need to get back into blogging, and creation of ideas, and maybe start a podcast back up. I miss spending time with smart people talking about what they are doing.
Pretty short list, but a lot to unpack.
As for my curiosity of AI. I’ve seen Cloud, and Kubernetes claim to drastically change the workplace, applications, and more. Now AI claims to change even more than both cloud and Kubernetes. However, neither cloud or Kubernetes drastically changed how we work and how we solve problems. Will AI be that solution that changes those things or will it fall into the same buckets as cloud and Kubernetes where it works for some, but not all? One thing is sure, 2025 will be a fun year. I look forward to it.
vNerdyNate #vExpert 