I've built my career from the ground up, starting as an apprentice troubleshooting telephony systems in the UK, through network engineering and team leadership across a 100+ client MSP, to now running the entire IT function at an independent school of 680+ users.

The thread running through every role is the same: I translate. I take complex infrastructure problems and turn them into language that boards, account managers, and end users can actually understand and make decisions from.

My curiosity with IT started long before any job title. As a kid, it was learning what a system restore point was the hard way after breaking the family PC, port forwarding a Minecraft Hunger Games server on a 10 mbps line and taking out the whole family's internet, and figuring out what software conflicts actually were by modding Fallout New Vegas. I've since built a career out of it. I still, to this day, have absolutely no idea why every app needs to install C++ redistributables. The curriculum doesn't cover any of that, funnily enough.