Xoogler School Q&A with Amit Singh

The Xoogler School started on Monday September 14, 2020 with Google Cloud's former President and current President of Palo Alto Networks Amit Singh sharing his insights with college students and those early in their career. The questions were submitted here.

You can watch the fireside chat with Amit on Xoogler School's YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe to the channel as Xoogler School will be sharing helpful advice by inviting dozens of ex-Google (Xoogler) speakers during the next 8 weeks. The sessions are focused on providing insights to college gap year students but they will also beneficial for others that are looking to advance in their career.

In the discussion, Amit talks about how you should take more risks early on in your career. In Palo Alto Networks, students that study a degree related to STEM, for example, Data Science, Computer Science and anything related to AI are in high demand. On the business side, SEO, outbound telemarketing, project management and being persuasive are sought after skills to have.

Senior roles like Amit's are about 3 things:

1. Talent. You want to have the best team, you want to find, hire and nurture your team
2. Culture. You want a great culture that is welcoming, fun yet accountable, one that allows you to take chances yet is safe when things fail.
3. Running the business. Setting up strong operations, processes and metrics. Being able to implement them and running that properly.

Here are some other key points that Amit shared:

Be Curious: Early in your career you should be a curious person. Follow your natural curiosity, and let your brain be calm enough to do so. If you're too busy, you won't have enough time to have a growth mindset.

Acquiring Skills: This is the time you should be acquiring skills.

Projects: When you are listing projects on your resume, you should describe the project and what you delivered. For example, state the ROI of the project. Many resumes would just say they worked on something. You should make it very specific, such as you worked on a project with 5 people, how you led the project, delivered it on time which resulted in X savings for the company, or had the outcome of doing a research paper that got awarded.

Secrets of Amit's success: He shared there is no secret. He worked longer hours than anybody else, read more books, took classes at night when he didn't know about business. He's always tried to learn from others, and observed others. For example, if that person presents well, how does he do better, he would get feedback from them. Many improvements are done on the job. There's nothing magical, just pretty basic things. He just wanted to get a little bit better every day.

Resume: For the resume of early career people, the diversity of experience matters and the quality of projects they have done. Especially when they have the same education and access to the same people

Networking: To be a good networker, you have to be able to say why you're interested when introducing yourself. If it's for a job, being able to state why this is the specific job that you're looking to do and why you will be great at it. You got to do some work. When you're trying to reach someone, learn about their background by watching their YouTube videos, find a way to connect with that person and be as specific as possible when making the ask versus being generic.

Communication: This is one area you should spend time on. Young people lack written skills as many young people haven’t spent much time writing. You need to have strong communication skills to make an impression to senior people and be able to present well.

Final Advice: Try and be balanced in your personal life. Spend enough time to learn new things, acquire new skills at this time. Make sure you network enough, don't ignore that. Think of it as work, you have to build your network early on in your career. It takes effort, you have to actually reach out to people. Skills acquisition and building your network are the two areas you can do and you can do it anytime, pandemic or not.

Here are the other upcoming Xoogler School sessions for this week. Add the Xoogler School calendar to access other upcoming sessions and subscribe to the Xoogler School YouTube channel.

Tuesday September 15

2pm PT Navigating Early Career Decisions - Joshua Mindel

6pm PT Designing Your Work Life - Mohammed Abdoolcarim,

Wednesday September 16

10am PT My Career in Product and Using Tech to Fight Climate Change - Michael Leggett

12pm PT What to Expect from an Entry Level Sales Job - Tony Pribyl

Thursday September 17

11am PT Developing Your Elevator Pitch - Brandon Middleton

Friday September 18

9am PT How to Explore Different Roles at a Large Company - Jimena Zubiria

11am PT Standing Out to Tech Recruiters - Stefanie Fackrell

If you're a college student or recent graduate, sign up to be informed of upcoming classes and join our newsletter and reach out to [email protected] if you have any questions.