Jo Karnes, Centric’s capability lead for Power Platform and Dynamics 365, has enjoyed a long, successful career in technology. But while she has had a passion for tech for most of her life, that passion didn’t translate into a traditional four-year college degree.
I sat down with Jo to talk about how she transitioned from school to the workforce in the 1990s, how the industry has changed, and what opportunities the field offers young people today. Not surprisingly, she’s still bullish on tech, regardless of the path up-and-comers choose to get there.
Have you always been interested in technology?
Yes! I am a lifelong computer geek. I built my first computer as a teenager. It had a 286 processor and 4MB of RAM. I loved hardware, and I continued to tinker throughout my high school years in Memphis. But by the time I started my IT career in the late 1990s, that technology was a distant memory.
You might think that I would have spent my years after high school in college, learning the ins and outs of LANs, WANs, programming languages, operating systems, software engineering, and the like. But I didn’t. Instead, I attended a year or so of college before leaving to enter the workforce, selling hardware and software.
Do you ever regret that decision?
No. I think that many people, especially parents, still believe that a college degree in computer science or a related field is required to succeed in IT—and it’s just not. In fact, more than 25 percent of people working as computer and information systems managers do not have bachelor’s degrees, and only a third of those workers have associates degrees. The rest of that 25 percent are people who, like me, picked up a few years of college along the way, but were too eager to get out there and start doing real things in the real world.
Why do you think that is?
It actually makes a lot of sense when you think about how quickly technology changes. Even the best academic institutions struggle to keep up with what’s happening in the world, because curriculum development takes about a year. Futurist Peter Diamandis has estimated that the next 10 years will see as much progress as the past 100 years, so you could say that by the time a new course goes from the drawing board to the classroom, it could already be 10 years behind.
In fact, I decided to enter the workforce before completing college because the computers I encountered there were too old to support my passion for the latest hardware. After working in sales for a while, I landed my first corporate job with a major pest control company.
What was the industry like in those days?
I started out training employees on the latest technology, and there was a lot to teach. Those were the Wild West days of tech. When I started in 1997-98, no one in the company had email, and the job of building servers to support Outlook ’95 or ’97, as well as increasingly cloud-based applications, fell to me. It was fantastic to be such a young person building servers for a major corporation, and I enjoyed being able to bounce from one project to the next and try new things. I finally felt challenged.
How does today’s job market differ from your early years in tech?
One big difference is that there are more, not fewer, opportunities for tech-savvy college-aged kids to make their mark in technology. As the capability lead for Power Platform and Dynamics 365, I see every day how these low-code, no-code solutions can lift the burden of writing code. Generative AI is another tool that helps make knowing how to write code a thing of the past.
These innovations mean that the tech workers of tomorrow will be freer to solve bigger problems more quickly without having to learn the ins and outs of multiple computer languages. In some ways, it’s like the transition I faced from hardware—which I love—to cloud computing has now become a transition from code-writing to quickly creating solutions that get things done.
What would you tell parents of high school or college-aged kids who are interested in tech?
As the parent of children who will be college-aged before my spouse and I know it, I am comfortable envisioning their futures in a world where college is less of a necessity, even for tech workers. Of course, they may want to complete college degrees, and that’s great, too. But my message to parents would be to keep an open mind and avoid the trap of thinking there is only one way for kids to thrive.