Welcome! Thanks for visiting my little corner of the Internet. I’m Katherine Lightner and I currently work at VMware as a Senior Pre-Sales Manager in its Cloud Architecture team.
It’s been quite a journey to get to where I am now, a career in technology is my second career so far. I spent many years of school (Batchelors, Masters) and a decade of work in the American healthcare industry. And while I did pick up some good transferrable skills, in the end I decided I hated it as my day job. So I went to work re-training myself for a job in technology, which I did in fact have a passion for.
Most of my early years in the tech industry were spent getting my hands dirty as a systems administrator. At one time when you bought servers from IBM, they arrived in pieces which you had to assemble. Talk about undifferentiated work! I’ve spent a lot of time rack & stacking, managing backups, Exchange servers, Active Directory, security, networks, end user systems, you name it. I learned that repeatedly using a punch down tool has a mild therapeutic effect & can calm the mind.
All of this grunt work firmly set me up for the path I’m on now, working for a technology vendor. As I shifted from being a hands on systems adminstrator to a pre-sales engineer for a vendor, my experiences understanding the day to day of customers have served me well.
I’ve been in the Dell Technologies family for my vendor career, first serving for several years as a pre-sales engineer at EMC and then moving over to the software side of the business at VMware in 2015. Before moving into my current role as a pre-sales manager at VMware, I also spent some time on the “dark side” working in sales as an account executive. My LinkedIn Profile has all the details.
Now, as a pre-sales leader in VMware’s fast-growing & dynamic cloud business, I’m focused on building the talent of my team, balancing the organizational demands of the business with their personal & professional development. And, I’m passionate about diversity and inclusion – diversity in thought, cultures, and genders is essential to building high performing teams.
Disclaimer: All topics and content are my own opinions and do not represent those of my employer.