With ServiceNow the sky's the limit

[Deaddin Edris]

Meet Ken Sheridan. He’s a senior software developer at ServiceNow. He’s been with ServiceNow for five years and says it’s been a great ride. And he credits Now Learning and the ServiceNow Community for helping him get where he is today.

Ken spent eight years in the US Marine Corps working as a meteorologist. During that time, he taught himself computing, an essential skill since meteorology relies on computing for things like climate modeling. As he got into computing, Ken found he really enjoyed it. So, when he left the military, he decided to run with these skills and build a career in IT. His first job was as a Linux system administrator at the State of California. He says it was a great job, but he was looking for more.

Then, in 2016, he heard about ServiceNow. He checked it out and decided he wanted to work here. Why? Ken says it’s because it’s a great automation platform that truly improves life for workers. He’d spent vast amounts of time in the military managing things with spreadsheets, and he wanted to make the world work better for everyone. So, Ken signed up for a ServiceNow personal developer instance and took the plunge. He quickly discovered Now Learning and the ServiceNow Developer Portal and took the ServiceNow Fundamentals course. Ken spent the next eight months learning everything he could, so he felt comfortable and confident when he secured an interview with ServiceNow. And he got the job!

Ken’s first assignment at ServiceNow was to create a portal to manage ServiceNow’s development infrastructure. ServiceNow has 18,000 servers and a massive amount of other equipment in our internal preproduction environment, and we need to track all of this. So, Ken signed up for ServiceNow development training. By the time he was halfway through the course, he already knew enough to start implementing.

Five years on, and that first solution—which includes ServiceNow CMDB, inventory tracking, agile project management, and performance benchmarks—is still going strong. It manages all of ServiceNow’s development infrastructure and provides self-service access to more than 50 people in our cloud capacity engineering and hardware engineering teams.

Since that first project, Ken has continued to grow his career at ServiceNow, and ServiceNow training and the Community have continued to play a huge role for him. He says you can see how vibrant the community is just by looking at the enormous turnout at annual Knowledge events. Ken finds working here incredibly exciting because ServiceNow is at the leading edge of the industry. He feels in control of his destiny—he explains that ServiceNow has a great culture where people share and listen, and managers at ServiceNow want to give people new opportunities rather than pigeonholing them in their existing roles. And he’s also been promoted recently and says he still believes the sky is the limit!

You can be like Ken and rise up with ServiceNow. He’s doing the best work of his life at a place where he can thrive—where his talents are needed, his experiences are appreciated, and his passion is rewarded. The time to go from just doing work to doing work you love is now. Not a second from now. Not a moment from now. No, right now. It’s your time to rise.

RiseUp with ServiceNow.