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.

06/10/2026

Jesse Taylor has a recommendation for every tech professional.

Work retail. At least once.

Not because the money is good.
Not because the career path leads anywhere.

Because working with people changes how you see people.

You learn to read a room.
You learn to hear what someone needs
before they know how to say it.
You notice eye contact, tone, the words
someone keeps circling back to.

"Those people skills are super important
and they will carry throughout your entire career."

Jesse carried that skill from the Apple store
to managing IT at a media company
to leading cloud engineering at UNLV.

Technical skills get you hired.
People skills determine how far you go.

06/09/2026

Jesse Taylor sold Macs at the Apple store.

Not because he loved retail.
He needed part-time work in college.

What he got out of it surprised him.

The trainers there didn't just teach product specs.
They taught him how to listen.
Really listen.

Evaluate what someone actually needs.
Not what they ask for at first.
The solution that fits them exactly.

"The art of listening is something
that I think is lost in a lot of places."

He carried that skill from Apple to enterprise IT.
From Mac labs to cloud engineering at a university.

Listening is still the thing that moves him forward.

05/11/2026

Jordan McConnell closes with the hardest part
of his career story.

Not the certifications.
Not the networking dinner.
Not the Hail Mary LinkedIn post.

The hardest part is this:
People will try to tell you who you are.

He's dealt with it.
He still deals with it.

He draws a line between two things:
reputation and character.

"People can try to dictate your reputation,
but you dictate your character."

Reputation is what others say.
Character is what you do every day.

You can't always control one.
You always control the other.

He says to find people in your life
who give you honest feedback.
Guard those relationships.

And be careful about who gets to
define you when you're not in the room.



05/11/2026

Jordan McConnell doesn't make people
prove themselves before he respects them.

He starts the other way.

Respect given.
Trust extended.
From the beginning.
Without conditions.

Not because they've earned it.
Because they haven't lost it yet.

"With me, people don't earn my respect.
They lose it."

He's specific about why.

He has a chronic illness.
He pays close attention to how people move.
To compassion. To empathy.
To whether someone gives you
the benefit of the doubt.

He wants to be around people
who start from a place of trust.

So that's where he starts, too.



05/08/2026

Jordan McConnell got a LinkedIn invitation
to a dinner in Las Vegas.

He was a cloud infrastructure engineer at MGM.

The rest of the table was all C-suite.
CISOs. CTOs. SVPs.
Senior leadership from across the country.

The person next to him was the CIO
of Allegiant Airlines.

He was the only engineer in the room.

He was nervous. He admits that.
He didn't say much at the dinner itself.

But before and after, he moved.

He found the CISO of New American Funding.
He introduced himself.
He said exactly this:

"I like my current job,
but I'm always looking for opportunity."

That sentence started a meeting
the next morning.

Closed mouths don't get fed.
One line opened the door.



05/07/2026

Jordan McConnell has lived with Crohn's disease
for years.

Not occasionally.
Every day.
In the background while he works.
While he takes care of his family.
While he does everything else.

He doesn't bring it up for sympathy.

He brought it up because it explains
how he thinks about hard things.

"It's easy to do hard things
when you're always doing hard things."

He didn't find a way around the discomfort.
He made it the baseline.

Most people wait to feel ready.
He never gets that option.

He just goes anyway.



05/06/2026

Nobody told Jordan McConnell to get into FinOps.

A colleague mentioned it in passing.
That was enough.

He got the FinOps Practitioner certification.
Out of his own pocket.
Then the FOCUS Analyst certification.
Same pocket.
Then he flew to the FinOps X conference in San Diego.
Still his own pocket.

He wasn't sent.
He wasn't reimbursed.
He just went.

When New American Funding called months later,
they asked what he had been doing.

He had everything to show them.

"I funded the entire trip to San Diego
out of my own pocket."

90 days after he started,
he pitched a cost savings plan
to the CISO himself.

Six months of work nobody asked him to do
opened the door nobody else could open.


05/05/2026

Jordan McConnell didn't leave the Air Force
and land somewhere soft.

He ran the network operations center
at Langley Air Force Base.
Top secret clearance.
Six years.
Supporting 100,000 people across 15 bases.

Ribbon cuttings with four-star generals.

Then he got out.

He went to Cox Communications in Omaha.
A customer service headset.
People calling in angry about their cable.

He was in the National Guard the same time.
The week and the weekend were two different lives.

"Getting yelled at during the week.
Called Sir on the weekend."

He didn't look for a faster route back.
He went all the way to zero and climbed.

That's the part nobody shows you in a job post.


04/27/2026

Juan Mazo was on a routine phone call.
A project manager was on the line too.

The PM mentioned something in passing.

"You're super expensive to get on a phone call."

Juan had no idea what that meant.

The company ran clinical trials.
Every hour was tracked.
Every person on a call had a rate.

His rate: $100 to $200 an hour.
The PM's rate: $50.

He'd never thought about his time that way.

That one phone call changed how he
looked at every call after it.

Some numbers change how you think.
That one did.

04/26/2026

Juan Mazo learned this the hard way.

Security proposals kept getting rejected.
He knew the company needed the work done.
The business didn't care about that.

"You can't go to a business and say
we need this thing because it's what
everyone else is doing."

That framing doesn't work.

What does work:
tie it to a revenue outcome.

If you're secure,
you can generate audit reports on demand.
You can shorten the sales cycle.
You can close more business.

Security isn't just operations.
It can be a revenue lever.

Most people in IT never figure that out.

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