Monica Martinez

What is the most useful piece of career advice you got as a student, and who gave it to you?

invest in any company savings plan that matches your own funds. from the beginning. it grows and you can take it with you if you decide to go to another job.

Did anyone ever oppose your career plans when you were young or push you in a direction you did not want to go?

my parents always told me I could be anything I wanted to be, until I really declared it, and then I got a lot of frowny faces. I changed my major 4 times, and luckily persevered to keep my grades and credits within my scholarship and budget. even though my own parents were opposed to me going out of state for school and about my changes, I was still able to get a good career and work at a great company. now they are proud of me, but it was after I proved I could do it on my own.

In layperson terms, what do you actually do at work?

I am a product manager for cloud services at Verizon Terremark. Now I manage all aspects of the Cloud business in order to keep it "alive" or sellable, that means: product definition, contracts, releases, costs, pricing, finance, sales, marketing... you name it, its like running your own business and working with a lot of smart people! Just so you know, I work from home and use conference calls and webex meetings to communicate with all the folks that make our business run. the way that my performance is measured is in how much revenue my cloud products make.

What is the one piece of career advice you wish someone gave you when you were younger?

Pay attention to what is going on, if you don't understand it, take a notebook and write down whatever you didn't "get" or understand or know the defenition of. don't be afraid to set up a 30 minute meeting with a coworker that appears trustworthy and ask them to explain why and what people were talking about. When I joined IBM, I felt confused and uncomfortable in every meeting for the first 3 months. I had no clue what anyone was talking about. Most professional organizations have their own language and none of it sounds like what you learned in school. I wish I would've had the courage to sound dumb, and ask for help from somebody who was already there. Later on, I ended up being an expert and would train others.

What is it like when your job gets tough?

When you really care about your job and your company, you get really passionate about work. Its easy to feel like there's too much to do, or too much complexity to make things work out. I get frustrated or despair about the amount of work, or the difficulty in figuring out how to resolve problems.....or combined number of problems to figure out that are hard! What helps me is to realize that these problems, are the reason that they hired me, the reason that I work there is because its not a perfectly functioning business, and that my boss has faith in my abilities to figure these out. And if in the end, I don't, well, its just a job, and not my personal life, so if worst case I royally mess up, then I'm pretty sure I'll get told and some help.