Fiona Tan — The Tech Journey

The Person:

Fiona Tan immersed herself in tech from the beginning. She worked through undergraduate and graduate school degrees in computer science, then entered the workforce with Oracle. She climbed the ladder at TIBCO software before making her final transition to Senior Vice President of Engineering and Customer Technology at the largest company in the world, WalMart.

Step 1 — Education

College — A college education in tech can be highly theoretical and somewhat dry. By finding practical applications for programs or code, and using them to supplement the theoretical knowledge in class, it creates a more realistic environment that will make it easier to find your passion in tech. As with any job, STEM careers also have high degrees of collaboration, understanding and teamwork. So branch out in college, take classes outside of your major that help you understand the bigger picture, interaction, and business rather than focusing on only one thing.

Step 2 — Mentorship

Mentorship — The Mentor and The Champion

1. The Mentor — The Mentor is the person who can help develop your skills. This relationship should be natural and easy, which will make the professional help and advice more meaningful and create a long lasting positive relationship.
2. The Champion — The Champion is someone who is in a position to advance your career. It is a person you form a relationship with for guidance, but who also sits in the board meetings and can help you be upwardly mobile.

It is highly beneficial to recognize that there is a difference in the types of professional mentorship you can receive, and how complementary and powerful it can be to have both. Make sure to maintain these relationships because having those previous connections and history with a mentor is important for future decision making.

Step 3 — Growth and Leadership in the Workplace

Growth — A tech career is defined by a constant cycle of learning. Because of this, make sure you are always growing in your career. Identify trends in the field and build a working knowledge of them to develop your own opinion and perhaps discover a new passion or application. If you are at a company where you no longer think you are growing, or it is not adapting fast enough, this is a solid and reliable signal that it might be time for a change.

Leadership — At the early stages of leadership with a small team, it allows you to be hands on and really develop people individually. However, as your team grows it is important to be able to step back. Use your support system of mentors and champions to help with new tasks and more responsibility. At this stage, your success can be measured by the success of the people you manage, which takes support but has high positive potential for a good manager.

Women in Tech -

Engineering and computer science are the fields with the greatest gender disparity when it comes to college degrees. However, technology users are an even mix between male and female. This balance should be reflected in the field. Early exposure is very important, as well as providing real world applications and emphasizing the problem solving that goes into tech and computer science. Technology underlies every single professional field, whether it be sports, fashion, design, or even retailers like WalMart, job flexibility that is not considered enough when women begin choosing the direction of their studies.

WalMart — Opportunities and Advice for Candidates

Walmart has a stunning breadth of technology that goes into enhancing the customer experience across stores, eCommerce, and apps. They take advantage of all tech in order to streamline efficiency and support their mission of saving their customers money so they can live better.

Interview Advice -

1. Do Your Research — It helps if you can show that you have shopped in their stores, used their app, and are excited about working to improve those platforms.
2. Be Eager — Apart from the basic skills, what shines through in an interview is your desire to learn paired with the willingness to work hard if a job is offered. These signals are subtle but very important and recognizable from the perspective of the interviewer.