Hey everybody, welcome back to the Mentor Agile podcast where we talk all things product owner and product manager. Joining me is my co-host Talal. Talal, how are you doing man? Doing just fine, it's a nice Thursday evening, almost a weekend. How are you doing tonight, Akber? Hey, I'm doing great, I'm doing great. You and I are both senior seasoned product owners working within the IT space. You yourself have an excellent degree and history working within the medical field. I myself have worked more in consulting gigs, taking on various different industries. So, I wanted to sit down with you and I wanted to understand, how did you personally break into IT? Well, uh, I think getting into that, it was actually just more so luck, you know, when I was graduating uh from college back in 2019, I originally had my focus on finance, and that's what my formal degree is in, a BS in finance. Finance uh, but then as I was coming towards uh the end of my college career, I started to realize that this wasn't something that I was interested in, and then actually one of our good friends, he himself was facing a similar predicament because he was going into medicine originally, right? You remember. I do. And uh he didn't want to do that, and basically, he found himself an opportunity to go through a boot camp to get into business analyst uh roles as a functional systems analyst, and then he broke in and he was making uh close to six figures right off the bat uh based on the education and the skills that he was able to acquire um and seeing that successful track record and just seeing the work-life balance that he was able to maintain um along with you know increasing the quality of lifestyle it just became attractive to me um so then eventually I found myself being recommended through him uh the same education that he uh put himself through and once I learned I was able to you know then start applying in the market and I was blessed enough to get my first job back in 2016. Nice, awesome. So you yourself also took a boot camp, um, was it a product owner boot camp, was it you know, talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, I mean to be frank, it was, it was a boot camp but you know it wasn't the boot camp in itself that provided me the exact value that was required uh for me to successfully land a job uh it's just said by the time I started to get into this, oh correction sorry I said 2016 but it was 2019 going into 2020 uh right around COVID time, right. But yeah, by the time I entered this space, um a good amount of my friends including yourself uh already had secured roles so the boot camp gave me a basic sense of guidance from a theoretical standpoint but when it comes to conceptualizing and applying that into the real world uh I had my friends and local people around me to help but it wasn't uh it wasn't necessarily all-in-one for me. Yeah, yeah no, and um when you took this boot camp now it was my understanding that you, you learned the you know the very basics of the job itself and you learned the very basics of the industry but the way the boot camp was run was maybe not the best experience, is that correct? Um, I mean the reason why I'm going to say yes you are correct is because I see how Mentor Agile and our program is has been designed um and just how it's how it's just meant to help actually not just teach you theory but help you experience concepts that can then be internalized and then applied uh with you having like a full picture and a sense of competency in the job market absolutely which was lacking when I did my boot camp. Yeah, absolutely, I would say one of the things that was lacking for me the most was a sense of being by myself a majority of the time, you know I would um, I would watch the recordings that were given to me and then maybe once a week for about an hour I would meet up with my instructor who was the owner of that boot camp and you know I would just ask my questions then and there but when it came to applying, when it came to interview prep, when it came to resume building I found myself having to do a lot of this you know by myself and through a lot of trial and error I had to put myself out there and you know I was also blessed enough to to um you know get a job fairly quickly but I feel like that was more so on my ability to self-teach myself how to take interviews and there was a ton of times I took interviews and you know I I absolutely bombed them and I got destroyed and knowing what I would have known now back then you know I wish I could have told myself things to do and not to do, right which is what we do cover in our boot camp over at Mentor Agile so in Mentor Agile as you mentioned we do full-scale interview prep we do full-scale resume building and we're with you every single step of the way because the last thing we want is for someone to be in that situation that we may have found ourselves in those years ago where we felt alone and we had questions and you know we wouldn't get the best response sometimes from either our instructors or the people that brought us into the boot camp. Yeah 100% and uh I think that's definitely the type of fresh perspective that a lot of people are looking to see and understand is uh why is it that we're even doing this in the first place uh it's about you know somebody mentioned this to me a few years ago and it makes a lot of sense so it's about taking our learning curve and make it their experience curve, right? Why do they need to waste time um and miss out on opportunities not to say we should have a scarcity mindset there is an abundance out there that is a belief that we should all maintain but given the current circumstances um why would you want to set yourself up for why would you not want to S set yourself up for the best chances at success, right? Absolutely, um so yeah like how you were explaining the interview prep um, the boot camp in itself the hard skills like it's a whole roadmap that we have from start to finish and even at the end of it you do have access to a community that you can leverage while you're on you know your first you get your first job your second job you get laid off you need another opportunity you have a support system and that's what we are trying to build in the long run. Absolutely, I love how you mentioned the community aspect of it that's what we are huge at when it comes to uh Mentor Agile and building our community we're not just with you um you know for the next 12 weeks or so we're with you 3 four years from now you know where let's say you do get laid off a couple years down the line because let's face it layoffs happen it's the tech industry right every single job has a possibility of getting laid off whether it's on you whether it's not on you right most of the time it's not on you at all but you want to be able to reach out to a community of people uh especially people who are senior in their careers who have saved in their companies who have some pull when it comes to internal referrals right um I myself recently just got a job as a product owner uh over for a local company out in Naperville how I got that job was through a student that I had taught years ago I had gotten him into the industry and you know what funny enough he referred me to this position that I'm now working at and that's amazing and that's amazing and I think that's the whole idea um like just just a less than a week ago I was contacted by somebody I went to college with and he he was saying like hey theal you know hope everything's well uh unfortunately I got laid off recently and am and I'm just struggling to find my next opportunity and I was just on his LinkedIn he was at uh his company since he graduated with me for five years and six months meaning right before he was with them before he even graduated like he started you know ramping up so I doubt that he just got laid off out of the blue just because of performance because how are you going to spend half a decade somewhere and not at least have a clue that you know your performance is you know the reason why you could be losing your job there's a lot of imp predict unpredictable factors here and we get how it feels it is a very stressful lonely type of feeling especially when you have a family um and that's again going into details that are probably very different for everyone but we're here to like I said like we say have a community that people can rely on yeah no 100% the law could not have summarized that better or put it in better the law I just want to say man thank you for joining me here today over at the Mentor aile podcast it's always a pleasure being with you man absolutely o looking forward to doing more work with you absolutely take it easy and for all of our viewers out there our listeners out there please make sure to check out Mentor agile. comom please make sure to check out our community at school and what I'd just like to end off with is we are your first step to get a job in Tech and if you are interested and want to learn more about Mentor agile's product man product owner product management boot camp we are giving interested folks free access to module one um and that way you can get a sense and feel of what it is to even learn with us and grow with us stay tuned!