Life Beyond College
Based on an episode with Noel Claudio 🇩🇴🇵🇷
Welcome to Latinx in Power, a podcast aiming to help to demystify tech, the way we do that is by interviewing Latinx and Caribbean leaders all over the world to hear their perspective and insights.
Noel Claudio (he/him), a highly skilled consultant, boasts extensive experience serving clients from some of the world’s leading Fortune 500 companies. With a Bachelor’s Degree in Information Sciences and Technology from Penn State University, Noel is equipped with the knowledge and expertise to excel in his current role as Program Manager at TikTok.
In this episode, we delve into Noel’s unique perspective as a first-generation college graduate and how it has influenced his work. We will also explore his efforts to support minority communities in the tech industry and his role as an advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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What does it mean to be a Latino for you?
When I hear the word “Latino,” I think about my ancestors, our ancestors. All of the struggles that they’ve had to go through, all the history behind it, no matter where in Latin America, immigrants coming to the United States think of Latin food, the amazing food and culture and history and music that we have. To me, it’s an embodiment of all those things mixed together. It’s truly a melting pot of so many awesome cultures and experiences that we have from history and even to today.
As a Latino, what I think about it is it’s an opportunity to show your ancestors that anything is possible, that we’ve come this far, we are bilingual now that we’ve done so much that you would have only dreamed of. We’re always fighting. That’s the one thing about Latinos in general. We’re always fighting, no matter what, for our people, for cause, for each other, and for our families.
How’s your experience being the first generation in the US and also, first generation to graduate in college?
I grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. For those who haven’t visited or know about Philadelphia, Philadelphia is a very tough city. It’s a city, like many other cities in the country, but it definitely has a reputation for many things. When you grow up in Philly, you get two sides of the world. You get the street culture, and then you get the beautiful, historic culture. Philadelphia is very big in the world in terms of the Constitution, in terms of the forming of the United States, the Liberty Bill, and so much more.
The other side is there’s a lot of communities in Philadelphia that are predominantly Latinx, Latino, Latina, and black. For me, growing up as a kid, I didn’t have much. My dad was a landscaper who grew up in San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico. He had a lot of issues growing up, and he was essentially not able to work much for his life and did a lot of the things under the table. The way that we had income growing up was he cut grass, he cut lawns, and that’s how we made a living, essentially.
My mom on the other hand, who grew up in El Campo in La Matas de Santa Cruz in Dominican Republic, she also came to the United States to essentially raise my brother with little on her back. She didn’t know English. She took a big leap of faith at age 26 to bring me as a baby over to Philadelphia. From there on, we had a lot of struggles growing up where we didn’t have many things.
I just remember as a kid that I knew one thing and it sounds bad to say, but the reality is I think it’s very important. I remember telling my mom and my dad to their face, I said, “When I grow up, I don’t want to be like you” and I mean that in a bad way. I had no interest in wanting a career in landscaping. I saw my dad many times suffer through asthma attacks, and heat strokes, and everything as an older man putting his body on the line, physical labor. Then, I saw my mom as a stay-at-home mom. It’s so hard to take care of kids to do that for her whole life. I said, “I want to work in technology. I want to work in a company where I get to travel.” All of these things were on my mind. But going to how this ties into the first generation, that was a big key here.
My mom didn’t graduate high school. Neither did my dad. They both had to take care of their families growing up. They were not able to go to college. There was no such thing for them. So, as a first generation, what that means in the United States is you’re the first in your family to go to college. And that’s an experience of a lifetime, because what are you supposed to do if you don’t have someone telling you what this event is? I’m going blindly into college looking at majors, and networking, and all of these things. I had no uncle who’s a partner at a company. I had no cousin who went and did this. It was all on me. So, the pressures of the first generation is that we have to hold so much weight on our shoulders. There’s so much that we need to plan for and organize. Not only do we need to translate for our parents, we need to understand how to apply in high school via FAFSA to understand what the grants are, you can get.
Those are things I learned myself. I had to talk to friends and people like, “Hey, you can actually get student aid and scholarships because you’re Latino. There’s not a lot of Latinos in college.” When I went to Penn State, I literally survived my four years of college, because I had scholarships and I had loans. So, I would take the refunds that came back from the package of scholarships and loans, and I would use that to pay my rent with my roommates throughout my years of college. So, it means a lot to be first generation. We’re always struggling. The thing is, it starts with college, but it doesn’t end there. You’re first in anything and everything you ever do. So, I’m the first in tech, I’m the first at consulting, I’m the first at many things, and I hope I’m definitely not the last.
How was your process into technology? Was it something that was always in the back of your mind or something that just happened? How was this process for you?
When I first was looking at what I wanted to do for my life and when I was in my early college days and even in high school, I didn’t necessarily know much about the tech industry. At one point, I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to go to the FBI, I wanted to do all this criminal investigation stuff because that is what I saw on TV a lot and I thought that was really cool. But what I really enjoyed watching shows like Criminal Minds and Law & Order and things like that is when you watch those shows, you see all the people running down the streets who are doing all the action stuff, right?
There’s always like one or two tech people who are the ones on the computers, who are doing all the fun stuff, where they’re looking up people’s addresses, and everything, and typing on the computer fast, and sending all the information out to the cops and such, I thought that that was super cool, and I said, “I want to do something like that. It sounds really awesome.”
When I went to college at Penn State, I did take my first couple of years, some courses around programming like Java and C++. I quickly realized that I wasn’t that good at it. It’s okay because tech is not just coding. A big part of tech is coding, but it’s not just coding. There’s also a lot of opportunities where if you want to get technical, you can still be technical, but don’t have to necessarily code, and that’s what program manager jobs are like and consulting jobs as well, where we work hand in hand with engineering teams and developers.
My interest stemmed from that, it was from watching things on TV. At the time, social media started to rise too. Obviously, at our age, Myspace was the thing back then. And then you see Facebook, you see Twitter rising when you’re in school. I could have never even imagined that one day I’d be working at a social media company like TikTok today. Then prior to this, Twitter, just because to me, those were just like, I thought that was the application and I was just like, “Oh, this is really cool. I use this every day, but never thought there was this massive army of people working behind the scenes to build these products.”
To me, that’s the beauty of technology is that, in our community too and our population, we tend to look at kids, for example, and our parents are like, “Don’t play any video games. Stop it. That’s bad for you,” things like that to all the kids. Now, it just got me thinking differently, because now, I actually do the opposite. I asked the kids in my family, “Why do you like this game? What don’t you like about it? What would you do differently? If you had to build a new player, how would you build that player? What features are missing here that you’d like to add?” Because I see the vision. I see that if a kid is enjoying a video game, why not go work for that company someday? Why not make your own, right? That’s the beauty of tech.
From my perspective, when I got to Twitter, it was a dream come true. I grew up in Philadelphia. I never thought I could make it someday to Silicon Valley to go all the way to San Francisco. It was something that I could never imagine, especially with a city like Philly, where it doesn’t have the same type of market that California has, or Austin, Texas, and such. So, it was a true honor to do that. That experience to me was everything. Again, you see an app that we use every single day, and you’re now behind the scenes trying to make it better, and that’s what I enjoyed about it the most.
Do you have a mentor, sponsor, how was this process for you and how impacted your success? Maybe if you have any advice for other Latinx and how they can use mentors and sponsors.
I think the conversation behind mentorship and sponsorship are two different ones. I feel like starting with a sponsor. The best way I can think about this is relating it to people who can make big decisions, who are the decision makers, executive audiences. We’ve had the chance to work on the BRG together with Alas. If we sponsor someone who has the ability to say, “Yes, you can borrow X amount of money to put on your events.” Or, “Yes, I am going to donate X amount to help you get into whatever criteria it is, maybe help you out with a scholarship,” things like that. Sponsorship is bigger and it’s sometimes very hard to get that, but a mentor is easier.
Here’s the thing about our community is that we just don’t like help at all. We’re very stubborn, and especially, Latino men are especially stubborn. We want to do everything for ourselves. We don’t even like going to the hospitals. We don’t like going to doctor’s appointments. I’m guilty of that too.
When it comes to mentors, especially in tech also, which is an industry that is suffering for many years and now still suffering when it comes to diversity, and inclusion, and representation of multiple ethnic groups, especially Latinx, it’s so important to have a mentor, someone who’s been there, who’s done it before, someone who is a little bit older and can guide you in what’s right and what’s wrong.
There’s so many different avenues to go. For me, I was fortunate to have a couple of those people throughout my career. I’ll be honest, I don’t do a good enough job, sometimes, to keep in touch, but when I do, it’s always great conversations. When I was at Slalom Consulting for a year, in a few months, I met this awesome director at Slalom built out of Boston. Shoutout to Renee. He was one of the first ever leaders that I’ve met in my career who was from Puerto Rico and much older than me, but also so nice and kind and wanted to help me and just give me advice about my career path, what’s right, what’s wrong, how I can stand out versus others. I was so happy because it was the first time in my life that I had someone who I looked up to, who was in the tech industry who comes from a similar background like mine.
If you think that we’re going through so many barriers to get to where we are today and more, think about the older generation, right? They must have gone through worse. That’s why they’re unicorns out there in terms of leadership. It’s very good to listen. Likewise, I highly recommend that we also have people who want to sign up to be mentors, because that’s missing. There’s not enough mentees to mentors either. I think the best advice is, if you are following someone’s career path, someone you really enjoy, you want to follow and be a role model after, reach out. Reach out. I’ve had people reach out to me who are much younger that I’ve been helping out and vice versa. You never know where it can lead to, and oftentimes, if not, they probably expose you to new opportunities and a different perspective that you would have never known. It’s going to be part of your maturation process to become a better professional in person.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to transition to program management?
To take a step back, what is program management and why do we hear so much out there on LinkedIn and everywhere about products but never program? There’s already a big gap there that we need to close. Program management is a huge world. It’s industry agnostic. You literally can be a program manager for each and every type of team, or whether you’re in finance or tech. It’s not specific to one industry.
You think about what a program is and you compare it to something that I also hear a time that I’ve been in the past like a project manager. What’s the difference? A program, you’re overseeing a large body of work, which is usually many different projects that could roll under a region, a similar function, whereas in a project manager, you might get into the real detail weave of one specific project or maybe two specific projects.
As a program manager, you’re doing a lot more. A lot of your job is to communicate with stakeholders, build relationships to manage multiple project plans, to do status and executive reporting, make sure everyone is put in the right place to succeed. I like to compare it to a chessboard where you’re just like making sure everyone’s in the right line and in the right position to move forward. It’s a huge career. For what I’m doing at TikTok at the moment right now, I’m overseeing multiple projects that span across different Latin countries like Brazil, Mexico, and more for many different things, some that I can’t talk about.
At the end, the concept of program management is, you can span maybe two, three, four years. These are very long, high intensity programs. You’ve got to be able to play the long game. You have to be able to make sure that you’re setting up for future success in whichever way that looks. You got to sometimes roll up your sleeves and talk to people. The fun part about being a program manager is you interact with so many stakeholders from legal security, trust and safety, engineering, sales, finance, HR, recruiting, like, you literally get a hand with everyone and you get to form a vision. You got a strategy, you got a vision, you have a mission, and then you execute. Then you bring everyone together. In the end, it’s the greatest feeling in the world when you’re able to accomplish what that common goal is.
I love program management. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes multitasking, who likes organization, who likes public speaking, and talking, and building relationships as well, and who truly wants to make an impact in the long term. I highly recommend it. We’ll get into this a little bit more, but one of the things that I’m doing right now is trying to fix that gap. So, I just recently started my own thing called Excel With Noel, which essentially is going to be a portfolio of different services that I’m going to offer. It’s for free. Right now, it’s not that I’m not charging or anything like that. It’s just given back to the community on just what are the best practices, tips and tricks to break into tech. What is a career in program managemet. What are the things you need to succeed. How you can get started. How you can update your resume to reflect some of those tasks that we look for and examples to be a program manager.
I didn’t get to talk a lot about it, but in the short story, I lost both my parents in the past 10 years. My mom, unfortunately, in 2017 and my dad in 2011 when I was in college. Both of them were a big part of my life and why I do the things that I do today and why I’m so passionate about giving back and helping, because my parents were like that too. I feel like I give a lot that they weren’t able to do. I do it now through my own offerings, my own words, and keep their memories alive by sharing my story. So, for anyone out there who’s going through it, just know, like, it’s alright to have good days and bad days. You’re definitely not alone. Everyone’s struggling with something. It’s always best if you want help to go seek it and to talk to people where you realize more people are going through the same thing than you think and you have that shared understanding. So, I definitely recommend that.
Coming back to the P’s, there Program Management, Project Management and Product Management. Another P to that is Portfolio Management, in more technical details, there’s a Scrum Master. They all do very different things. So, Portfolio Manager, you’re really looking at a collection of programs. This is a step above a Program Manager. It is a very rigorous role as well. It tends to be for someone who is more at the executive level. Whereas in like a Program Manager, again, you’re managing a collection of projects. That could all be towards one vision. If I got to roll out a new technology system for a new store, for example, my program could be a fraud and benefit recovery or something along those lines. Under that fraud and recovery space, you have so many projects that might fall under what you need to get done.
Again, program management, we were worrying about the success of this fraud and recovery program, which might have a two-year date and might have a bunch of little things happening all at once, which all rolled up. Whereas in a project manager, it is going into the details and owning one or two or three of those little projects that fall under where they’re the detailed experts. A lot of times, we can’t get into those detailed conversations, because we just don’t have the time. So, a status report from a program manager perspective is going to feature multiple projects, multiple work streams, multiple red, green, yellow types of statuses. Whereas in a project manager, it’s going to go one by one to, here’s the status of Project X, project Y, project Z and so forth. So, it’s going to provide that context for the listeners.
I’ve seen the certifications that come with this learning, like a PMP, for example, is crucial. It teaches you so, so much about the different topics of a project and program, and best practices, and how you should do things in the industry. You learn from that and you apply it to situations. You don’t have to start from nowhere. I recommend checking out pmi.org. I’m going to put in the plug, because I loved it. I loved my experience just going through the PMP training certification process. So, if you’re looking into a career, there’s so many certifications that the Project Management Institute offers. It’s very industry standard. It’s going to look great on your resume. It’s going to be great for foundational knowledge and will truly teach you the little things that you’ve always wanted to know about how to get started and talk to people.
I hope you enjoyed the podcast. We will have more interviews with amazing Latinx leaders the first Tuesday of every month. Check out our website Latinx In Power to hear more. Don’t forget to share comments and feedback, always with kindness. See you soon.
Additional Reading Mentioned in the Interview
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