IT Milk: entry

Michael McGarry, the Chief Technical Officer at Genworth Financial, gave a presentation to the SRA Club at Penn State University.

McGarry’s presentation consisted of:

• An overview of Genworth Financial, an insurance company parented by General Electric
• Michael McGarry’s journey from a high school student in Cleveland to becoming a CTO at an international financial security.
• Case study of a critical security breach at Genworth Financial that coincidentally occurred during the most crucial stage of its IPO.
• Career and interview advice to IST and SRA students

The most memorable piece of advice that McGarry gave us was to always deliver on the current job. His history proves that if you work hard on whatever comes to you, people will come to you and move you up to higher positions. In McGarry’s words, “You will never have to write another resume.” He said that people who have constant job problems are the ones who are always thinking about what comes next while slacking on what’s given to them now.

Another interesting piece of McGarry’s advice was to develop a specialty in some field of IT. McGarry expects his new employees and interns to have deep technical knowledge in one specific field such as networking, database, project management, programming, or security. This would make us much more attractive hires than other job applicants who only have a broad and shallow knowledge about everything.