Lauren McDonald

I think some of it is not really that complicated in that people ask me, do you like what you do? And I'm like, if I'm around good people and it's interesting work, I'm happy. Like, it's not a hard equation. So from my own personal success, I've got drive - I don't like being bored. But if I'm in an area, you know, constantly searching for that area where I'm working with great people, and we're working on interesting problems, it's really not any more complicated than that. How I'm successful at that is, you know, I think that's just again, back to the drive piece of it before, but kind of a simple equation for me.

When I was debating whether to go for a technical degree, advanced education degree, or MBA, I was given the advice of kind of balancing it with my work scope and trying to do the opposite. So if my primary job, especially early career, was more heavily into project leadership and business analysis and management, to get a more technical degree to kind of offset that, especially early career. I think that was one of the reasons why I had a more technical master's in IT. I think it was really beneficial, because I got a lot of the experience needed to talk to the C-suite and build executive presentation skills, and change management, and being able to run a project and communicate to all the stakeholders - I was doing that on my job. I didn't need to go to school for that. But then supplementing the engineering and the technology skills in my degree was really helpful. So I think that was some really good advice.

For women, I would say you do have to advocate for yourself. You have to have a voice. It can be uncomfortable. Advocate for yourself, and find your champions. I've had a lot of champions, and some of them - I purposefully say champion and not, you know, female mentor, or anything like that. I've had champions that were men that could see the disparity and absolutely had your back and pushed even further because of the unbalance. And that helped a ton, because it's very easy to kind of lose your confidence when you're outnumbered. So finding your champion for a young career woman would be probably the best advice.

The most obvious opportunity is going to be AI. There's so much going on in that space, and it's fascinating. I think that we are actually, as consultants, seeing an uptick in demand because of AI, almost the opposite of what you would imagine with the industry. But there's so much opportunity and so many interesting use cases that it can solve that we actually need more focus from people that would understand how to implement it. And we're seeing it across all of our clients, so it's helping us provide more of a broad, focused approach to people that are brand new at AI. So we're seeing a little bit of an uptick in demand on how to get started in it. And then, like, you know, 20 years in the career, I've seen a lot of different IT trends. And they're at the top of the Gartner Hype cycle right now. A lot of these AI initiatives aren't going to prove the ROI that we think they're going to prove, and we're going to adjust at that point to other solutions that, you know, you don't have to solve everything with AI. So, there's gonna be kind of a backpedal into more of the, you know, it's gonna become a tool in our toolbox, not the only tool that we use. AI is a pretty interesting opportunity right now to figure out where it works, where it doesn't, and coach clients to take the most advantage. The biggest challenge for me, and I'll put a lot of it on myself, is understanding what I don't enjoy about what I do. And I don't enjoy corporate politics. I am very - I love people, and I respect people that are great in corporate politics and know how to work in it. It kind of just raises my stress levels way too much than I'm comfortable for. The corporate politics piece of it is why I really love being a consultant, because you're a little bit farther removed, but you're still really focused on that business problem, and less about how is this going to impact me? Because it's not about me at that point. I'm just there to help serve projects. If you guys want to go another way, totally cool. There's plenty of work for us to go and work on as a consultant, and it's not going to impact my personal career. So, some people, I think, are less sensitive to that than I am. So, if I, you know, the one thing that I struggle with is corporate politics.

I would say a mix of creativity and just - we call it hunger, at our company, but it's you know, kind of that endless, how do you make it better? How do you - like, you just kind of that push, that drive on really making something excellent to deliver to the client, or to deliver to the business. And trying to teach that to our kids, too. I mean, it's how do you be the best that you can at that one specific thing. Work really hard, try really hard, continue to re-evaluate, is really - and there's some other values associated with that, but, you know, I think that's if there was one thing that I pushed really hard on. I think it's that trying to - that excellence, that drive.