Systems x People x AI. Your Way Forward.

Offerings for Individuals in Tech 

With over 27 years of professional experience across Europe and Asia and counting (he started working in 1998), Khang Nguyen Trieu had the opportunity to grow a successful career in different companies and contexts, and has been both an individual contributor and a manager up to C-level positions. He also had his fair share of professional challenges and setbacks at some points in his career upon which he was able to build his way forward (one of the reasons he named his venture with this name).

Khang has always taken pride and satisfaction in growing the people in his teams – grooming some for example to a level where they ended up being invited (travel expenses covered) to go to AWS Re:Invent flagship event in Las Vegas to talk on stage. After 20 years of experience, some people in his network reached out to him for mentoring and he realised that he enjoyed helping people in tech grow beyond people in his own teams.

One thing to keep in mind though: for mentoring to have a noticeable impact, there are a few conditions to fill:

• A real sense of frustration on your side. Mentoring will bring you concrete insights and tools to activate, but will require commitment to take actions on your side. You must feel this urge to avoid wasting your time and money. There are other ways to progress if you have not reached that point yet: continuous learning, listening / watching inspiring podcasts, etc… A good way to start is for example to subscribe to the free “from Geek to Star” newsletter that Khang is publishing regularly, which shares insights and tips on how to grow in a tech career in this AI-age.
• An alignment of values between the mentee and the mentor:  advices, guidance you get from a mentor must be applicable to you. Meaning that you must feel they are aligned with your values to be able to apply them. Similarly, you may dismiss them / find them not relevant if your values differ too much from your mentor. There is no right or wrong in this, just a difference of paths.

Here are Khang’s values:

“Believing in sharing, transparency and freedom to take initiatives”
“Having a positive and forward-looking mindset”
“Leading with respect rather than as a brutal leader”
“Fostering collaboration and collective success beyond organizational silos”

You can check his Linkedin as well to get a glimpse of his professional convictions and stance and if you’ve gone beyond this point, you are good to go for a 20min “get to know” each other to see if you want to proceed further with mentoring. As part of his mentoring, Khang uses a behavioral framework he designed himself to be relevant for engineers in tech: SHINE

• Soft Skills development
• Hard Skills development
• Industry Knowledge development
• Network (meaning relationships) development and nurturing curiosity
• Experience build-up 

Starting with a self assessment and a discussion on the goals you want to achieve personally, Khang will use this framework to help you grow up not only for yourself but in the eyes of the company.

For frustrated Tech experts

In a world where Technology is Power, it seems very strange that so many tech experts feel they are not recognized up to their value and not compensated as they should. Except for limited companies such as typically the big Silicon Valley ones (Google, Meta, OpenAI, Salesforce, Microsoft…), the reality is that most companies have kept their vision of Tech the same than in the past decades when “IT” was merely a support function. As an individual, recognized for your technical expertise in the company but without clear perspective for evolution of your career and compensation, how do you break this ceiling glass that is written no where? This is where mentoring can help you to identify the steps / tactics and actions to take to go beyond the ceiling glass: not necessarily to become a manager if your passion is into tech, but to become a Most Valuable Individual in the eyes of the management and the company for you to have the desired impact – and related compensation.

For Tech leaders going international

 Khang is a French of Vietnamese origins. Born in France, he grew up with a double education: mostly Vietnamese / Asian at home, French at school and then at work. In 2016, when he moved to Singapore with his family, his first job involved building a software engineering team in Singapore and in Vietnam. Confident that his Asian roots would help him to manage teams in Asia as easily as he used to manage team in France, he discovered he still had to learn on managing cultural differences. In the second company he joined in Singapore as General Manager, he had to manage international initiatives with product and tech engineering teams from Singapore, Philippines, India, UK and USA. He went a step further in the third company he worked for, leading at C-level a massive cloud migration of 45 regional datacenters and server rooms involving teams across all continents as well as helping to set up a Tech center in Bangkok and make it work together with the historical Tech center in France, as well as outsourcing in India. 

For Tech leaders who are taking on responsibility of teams at a country level to an international level, especially with high cultural differences (Western / Asian), mentoring can help to set you up for success.

For Tech leaders aiming at C-level positions

 As Tech leaders climb up the management ladder (for those who choose to go this way), they may feel they are sometimes following a lonely path, especially if working in a company which dominant culture may differ with their own (e.g an Asian leader in a Western company, a Western leader in an Asian dominant culture company). Daily interactions out of the Tech population will increasingly (or should if it is not the case) take a significant amount of time. While still being perceived as “The Tech person” in the C-Suite and Board room, Tech leaders at this level must also make their counterparts feel that they are much more than this, able to provide global strategic thinking beyond just Tech. A blend of coaching and mentoring in a safe and confidential space can help Tech leaders to forge their path ahead with more serenity.