My mom was born and raised in California but worked after finishing college in Chicago, moved to Connecticut where she worked at several Public Libraries before becoming the corporate librarian at Aetna Insurance Company, an interesting position we don’t think of today, but before the internet, companies had libraries full of books for their employees to learn and grow. With the dawn of the information age, her career shifted more in human resources training and corporate expansion since that required knowledge of company history and ability to train new employees on the ways of the company.
My Dad was born the son of a doctor in Long Island New York worked in several different fields before shifting into a library career where he spend my childhood as the director of the Public Library in Middletown Connecticut. He oversaw two major expansions of the building and was highly involved in the workings of the city.
My parents met while attending Connecticut Library Association board meetings, and I would not be here today if it weren’t for that storied history (pardon the pun).
My career began in middle school when started building personal websites on Geocities that grew into a .com business I ran through high school and college. I interned at Washington Mutual Bank where I discovered SharePoint from Microsoft was a very effective way of organizing content and communicating. In addition to helping define standard project methodologies for the Technology Solutions Group, I also built a SharePoint site to communicate how to use SharePoint. I was content to continue that job after college, but in a strange twist ended up taking a job at a technology consulting firm called Hitachi Consulting, the American consulting arm of the Japanese Hitachi LTD that everyone knows makes construction equipment, TVs and more.
Through Hitachi Consulting, I learned to implement Oracle Systems to help companies run more effectively, and then shifted into building Business Intelligence solutions, organizing and integrating data to provide decision-makers with better information about various aspects of their companies. I worked all over the northwest including F5 Networks, Xerox, Boeing, Microsoft, and Intermec (now Honeywell).
After deciding I had been through enough cycles of requirements gathering, design, development, testing, deployment and training, and wanting to own something longer term, I took an unexpected job at a billboard advertising company called Clear Channel Outdoor. This was against the advice of my parents who worried this was a step backwards from working at big tech companies, but I am very glad I didn’t go to Google or Amazon, and ironically Microsoft had turned me down for a full-time position handling what I was working on in my last consulting gig there. If I had taken a job in Big Tech, I woudl have been a small cog in a big wheel. Sure there’s a chance I would have excelled to the top, but I am much happier with how things ended up with Clear Channel.
Clear Channel was a charming old (100+ year) company with just 1400 employees. It had plenty of technology (Saleforce,
All in all, my recent introspection surrounding my career path and thinking about my parents led me to conclude that I have been a librarian all along. I spent my 16-year corporate career organizing, managing, and presenting information to help companies run more effectively. What else does a librarian do? I will most certainly find out as I open the Library of Everything.
