I started on the wire. Active Directory, ticket queues, access points — the unglamorous layer where a school district either works on Monday morning or doesn't.
That layer produces an enormous amount of data, and almost nobody reads it. So I started reading it: scripting monitors, then dashboards, then an ETL pipeline in Spark because the finance team was rebuilding the same spreadsheet every Monday. Troubleshooting time dropped 35%. Fifteen hours a week came back. The analytics track opened itself.
What I learned next is that neither track matters if nobody agreed on the question. So I went and got certified in business analysis, then project management — and started running discovery sessions before writing a single query. At the City of Kamloops that meant governance frameworks, requirements documentation, and dashboards two departments actually depend on.
Today the three tracks are one job: understand what the business needs, build the infrastructure that can carry it, and prove the result with numbers. Azure and Terraform on one side, Databricks and Power BI on the other, stakeholders in the middle.