Speaker: Krissy Wong, Technical Instructor
Introduce yourself! What is your role and how long have you been with ACI Learning?
Krissy Wong: Hi, my name is Krissy Wong. I'm an Instructor/Mentor and I have been with ACI Learning for 1 year.
Tell us about your professional journey.
Krissy Wong: I have a Bachelor of Science degree in IT with the focus in communications from FSU - Go Noles! My first love is always going to be web development. That's what brought me ultimately to everything else that I've done in this lifetime. My father was actually a computer engineer and the family business has been maintaining remote contact centers. So 20 years before the rest of the world was working from home, I've been working with Telephony a voice over IP software as a service solutions for remote desktops, and secure sign on solutions using the original hard tokens. I've seen that transition that we've gone to where we currently are with things like Okta verify and the Google authenticator app. I've spent, well actually fun fact, most of the jobs that I have maintained have been work from home. I've worked from home for longer than the rest of the world has between the call centers, maintaining my own web design businesses, and in addition to now I'm teaching for ACI Learning. I spent time as a scheduling coordinator, working for workman's comp managing those contracts across several different time zones. So remote distributed teams is my wheelhouse. I prefer very flexible work environments and lifestyle companies. I spent some time, I needed a big change when I was about 25, and I decided that teaching would be my community service project. So I went to teach computer science and cybersecurity at the high school that I graduated from. I did that for 5 years. One of my biggest objective was to bring a cybersecurity program to give students the opportunity, who were not necessarily college-bound, to give other flexible career options. I taught AP classes as well as game and same classes, but before I left to have my first daughter, I wrote the cybersecurity curriculum for Broward County. So I was teaching the same certificate that I teach on the CUSS track, the CompTIA A+, Net+, and Security+ to high school students to give them a cutting edge in the workforce. But also the opportunity those could also have been transferred to college credits and many of our Florida institutions. So currently I am with ACI Learning and I am working towards my master's degree in cybersecurity and information assurance.
What is your favorite thing about the IT industry?
Krissy Wong: My favorite thing about the IT industry is that it is ever changing and for some people's change is scary and intimidating. For someone who dreads doing the same exact job function daily, every single day for the rest of my life, IT was one of the fields that would give me the most range of options. At that time, we used to say that technology changes every six months. I think that has grown exponentially since you know, my younger years of deciding that IT was the direction that I plan to take. Now that we're here, you don't like something, there is another facet. You don't even have to make a full career change to something else. IT will always leave me with endless options. It could be web development, it could be actual repair of hardware, it could be setting up networks, it could be defending networks, and/or it could be hacking into networks and having a little fun with being paid to tinker around and figure out how things work, which is originally, you know how I figured things out. My dad was a computer engineer but not one who were like "let's do this" like we're teaching a class and "click here and do this". No, I had access to computers and I did things like delete System32. But, you know, here we are and I know better. I know better by textbook definition, but I also know better by live example. Why not see what would happen? Please don't delete your System32.
What has been the most valuable lesson you have learned from your education?
Krissy Wong: So in education and computer science programming being the realm I'm specifically referring to and thinking about how we now transition into this concept of AI and where we're currently going, my education has taught me that all problems can kind of be solved with an algorithm. It's changed the way that I process personal information with my own brain. Decision making, so that's the biggest thing in both machine learning and in what makes code tick ultimately. We're all making a series of 'yes or no' decisions, just conditional statements of what to do. You put on your shoe and your brain goes, "is there a shoe on the other foot?" If yes, go out the door. If no, put on the other shoe. We make decisions like this all the time and although I know that life is not always black and white, having this concept or this way of thinking, this logical thinking gives you an ability to problem solve in other parts of the workforce and other parts of sometimes even personal problems, etc. but it changes the way that you think when you start to think like a machine and machines were not given to us by ancient aliens. Ultimately, computers were programmed by humans and the way that we decide to describe these things to computers or create our programming language is not far off from the way that our own brain operates, but our brain works as such a perfect computer. We don't have to think about the actions that we do every day. These are processes that go through and throughout. But to speak, to pick up a pencil off of the table, it all starts in your brain which is processing power first. So the more you can relate our study of intelligence to our own human intelligence and the way that works, you start to see things differently and conceptualize these theories a lot differently and not just while you're working with black and white items at work.
What's something you want students to know about you?
Krissy Wong: I want students to know that I believe in them. I don't believe there's any student that is unteachable, or any concept that is too hard. It's not about whether you can or can't, it's whether you will. It's not about 'I don't know it', It's 'let me find out', the answer is never 'I don't know'. It's 'I don't know yet...'
What advice would you give to students starting out in the IT industry?
Krissy Wong: Please do not be intimidated by job experience or education requirements. Your certifications, this is one of the very few fields that your certification sometimes hold higher weight than actual degrees when it comes to certain jobs. It says that you have workable hands on skills. The time that you have spent in labs specifically Practice Labs, which by the way is the reason that I came to ACI Learning, it is one of the most valuable teaching tools that I had as a K-12 educator, and I love Practice Labs. Leverage that in your interviews, don't say you did it in labs. Say you have experience working with active directory and password policies and you understand how to configure networks All of these things that you see in these job descriptions, they are nice to have if you meet even 5 out of the 10 criteria, apply anyway.
