Career Downloads

Career Downloads The podcast where professionals are interviewed to learn more about their backgrounds, job history, and techniques used to manage their careers.

09/23/2026

How do you get promoted
without ever applying?

Joshua Leavitt was working data entry
at a bank when management
accused him of hacking their systems.

Turns out he had just taught himself
Excel macros to pass the time.

Instead of getting fired,
he got pulled upstairs to IT
for what was supposed to be two weeks.

"You're not going back down.
You're staying up here."

He never got a transfer memo.
Just a new desk and no way back.

Some careers start with a decision
someone else makes for you.

09/22/2026

What happens when doing the right thing
gets you labeled a problem child?

Joshua Leavitt was sorting coins
at a Las Vegas bank for $7 an hour.
His manager promised a $1,000 bonus
to anyone with a good idea.
He delivered. The bonus never did.

So he rallied his coworkers.
They pushed back together.
Management gave the whole team raises.

He got something else instead.

"Josh is a problem child.
We don't want him hanging out in there."

They gave him a chair with no title
and told him to look busy.
Bored out of his mind,
he taught himself Excel macros
just to pass the time.

That empty chair started his whole tech career.

Sometimes getting sidelined
is how a career actually begins.

09/17/2026

Sirinda Glasgow was dreadful at public speaking.

A friend convinced her to try Toastmasters.
She had spent years working behind a desk, heads down.

Standing in front of a room felt nothing like her day job.

"I was dreadful.
Not only was I nervous,
I had a lot of ums and ahs
that I wasn't even hearing."

By the end of the year, she got most improved.
That skill mattered even more once she moved into sales.

Some of the most useful skills aren't technical at all.

09/16/2026

Sirinda Glasgow had just been offered a referral.

Dell wanted her to cover Nevada and Arizona.
Mostly day trips: Reno, Phoenix, home by night.

Still, she called her brother first.
Just in case a flight got delayed.

Around that time, she asked her kids
what they wanted to be when they grew up.

"...looked at me and said, not what you do.
They said, you're on call all the time, mom."

That hit her hard.
The on call life had shaped her whole career.

Dell's offer finally gave her a way to dial it back.

Sometimes the promotion isn't about the title.
It's about getting your evenings back.

09/15/2026

Sirinda Glasgow kept getting blamed for cable failures.

She hadn't even touched half of what broke.

Back then, outsourced techs handled the break fix work.
When something failed, her cable was the easy target.

So she stopped taking their word for it.
She bought her own testing equipment.
She checked every connection before anyone could ask.

"I would always validate it.
And then I would have them show me
why you think it's the cable."

Little by little, she learned to do
what the Sys Admins did too.
Not because someone taught her.
Because she had to prove herself first.

Soon she was configuring systems.
Teaching classes nobody assigned her.

Being right wasn't the hard part.
Proving it, every single time, was.

09/12/2026

Iana Relampagos joined a bootcamp cohort of 20.

Some people had already built their own PCs.
Others had never touched a computer before class.

Her instructor set the bar early.

"I want 100%."

The cohort answered back.

"We're going to give you 100%.
That's exactly what we're going to do."

Nobody hoarded what they knew.
If someone was struggling, the group showed up.

Study sessions turned into something closer to family.

In the end, one person out of twenty didn't pass.

Community doesn't just make learning easier.
It makes people finish what they would have
quit on alone.

09/11/2026

Iana Relampagos ran into
a coworker in the hallway.

He was reciting port numbers
out loud, to himself.

She had no idea what that meant.
So she stopped and asked.

He was studying for his
A-plus certification, through
a free program called Tech Impact.

She was skeptical at first.
Free rarely means good.

She asked what it actually
included.

He told her: a mentor,
an internship, help
finding a job after.

"I did my research.
I applied that night."

She started the very next cohort.

One hallway conversation
she almost walked past
became the reason she's
in tech today.

You don't always recognize
the moment that matters.
Sometimes it just sounds like
someone talking to themselves.

09/10/2026

Iana Relampagos was working
as a security officer.

No IT team on that property.
So when the cameras went down,
she was the one they called.

She had no technical background
going into it.

So she started asking questions.

"Hey, how does this work?
You guys are talking about
cleaning servers.
What does that mean?"

Nobody assigned her that curiosity.
She just kept asking until
things made sense.

Then she started asking to shadow
people, badge readers included.

Eventually she was the one
they called first.

Nobody trains you to be curious.
You just have to keep
raising your hand.

09/09/2026

Iana Relampagos was working
full time and going to school
full time.

That sounds disciplined on paper.
She says it wasn't.

"I was very young, so time
management was not my best suit.
I'm going to be honest,
I was very reckless."

She used her lunch breaks to study.
Then she'd skip her homework
to go out with friends instead.

She called it fun she deserved.
At the time, it felt earned.

Eventually the schedule caught up
with her, and she had to stop
going to school altogether.

She still calls it
one of her biggest regrets.

Discipline isn't about
how much you can carry.
It's about what you do
with the hour you actually have.

09/07/2026

JC Rolison thinks about relationships differently.
He looks for what other people need,
not what he can get from them.

A missed coffee run. A tired voice.
He notices the small things first.

"It's always about identifying what is missing."

That mindset didn't stay personal.
It became how he runs his business today.

Nobody remembers who asked for something.
They remember who noticed what they needed.

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