08 Step 8: More marketable = promotion = your freedom. And the final step, GET PROMOTED. After delivering on a minimum of two strategic projects per year, you WILL be in line for a promotion. If not, there are thousands of companies hiring IT talent, especially talent that has a track record of delivering solu- tions that positively impact organizations. You are now an agent for change, positive change, and not a dime-a-dozen, 9-5 IT guy. The world needs more change agents and fewer IT guys. The Final Step: THE PROMOTION Ben is a career IT guy. Feeling frustrated, he reached out to a trusted advisor to understand the technologies that would lessen the redundancies and move him up the ladder. The State of Disruption Report is one example of how we arm ourselves with the most current trends in technology. With the help of his TA, Ben migrated an expensive cisco call manager to a new cloud telephony solution. He followed the telephony project with an SD-WAN solution from Aryaka. The result was $1M in savings by eliminating a Lumen MPLS network. Ben was promoted from IT manager to Global Infrastructure Manager and traveled the world, earning points for future family vacations in the process. Richard is an IT Manager working in the restaurant industry. 40% of his time involved patch- ing, maintaining, and managing an end-of-life Nortel phone system. Richard worked with his TA to explore the market for cloud-based collaboration solutions and implemented a communication standard for all current and future restaurants. The cookie-cutter approach slashed their Telco bill in half and freed up Richard’s time to focus on cybersecurity and other more critical initiatives. Richard was promoted to Director of IT from IT Manager. His boss was also promoted to CIO. He is no longer running from restaurant to restaurant, putting out our fires. Richard was able to hire an IT guy to help. Bob is the VP of Technology for a large staffing firm. Bob’s team was in trouble with chronic phone outages negatively impacting the business. The situation was so dire that it even became an agenda item for the company’s board of directors. Utilizing technology to its fullest in staffing is paramount. Bob’s team had already moved their communications plat- form to the Cloud but chose the wrong provider. Bob worked with his TA to quickly narrow the entire vendor portfolio to find the right vendor. With the help of his TA, they could find and implement a solution in just 45 days. Bob was recently promoted from VP of Technology to Head of Cybersecurity for a new business unit. He is on track to land a CIO gig. We wish you much success. Cloud Trusted Advisor | www.cloudtrustedadvisor.com | 312.925.7731