From IT Support to AWS TAM: Dalien Ahiekpor’s Career Journey | Ep028

Episode Information Show Notes In Episode 28 of Career Downloads, Manuel Martinez interviews Dalien Ahiekpor, Senior Technical Account Manager at AWS, who shares his transformation from tech-curious teenager to cloud professional. Learn how winning a PC at a summer tech camp sparked Dalien’s interest in technology, why he chose computer science despite early struggles with programming, and how he navigated from network engineering to his current role. Dalien reveals the six-month job search that tested his persistence, his unconventional approach to landing his dream position, and the profound impact mentorship had on his career trajectory. He offers practical interview advice for standing out among candidates and emphasizes taking ownership of your career path. Whether you’re looking to break into tech, transition to cloud computing, or find effective mentors, this conversation provides actionable strategies from someone who’s successfully navigated the journey. #CareerDownloads #CloudComputing #AWSCareers #TechMentorship Transcription Manuel: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to learn about their background, their experiences, to really uncover any actionable advice that they’ve used to manage their career that you can go ahead and implement and use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me a co-worker. His name is Dalien Ahiekpor and we work together. We looked at his background. He’s very passionate about mentorship and also like early career growth. So I thought he would be a great person to kind of bring on and I won’t dive too much deeper and I’ll let him kind of explain a lot of that for us. So with that, welcome Dalien. Dalien: Hey folks, thanks so much for having me. Manuel: No problem. I appreciate you coming on and, you know, being open to sharing your experiences for others and, you know, you know, helping somebody out who could probably find value in this. Dalien: Absolutely. Manuel: So if you don’t mind to start off, kind of tell me what your current role is and just a brief summary of, you know, what are some of your roles and responsibilities for kind of what you do in that role? Dalien: Sure. So as Manuel alluded to in the beginning of the call, I’m a senior technical account manager at AWS. We’re colleagues. I’ve been working at AWS for a few years now in various roles. As mentioned, most commonly or most recently, the senior technical account manager role are commonly referred to as TAM. As a TAM, we’re really responsible for, we’re seen as the customer advocate on the account team. So we’re an extension of enterprise support where we really quarterback a lot of the operational concerns that a customer might have, any issues they have with services, escalations, helping them understand a strategic initiative for their company and how we can help with that. That’s what we do here at AWS Enterprise Support. Manuel: So now, if you wouldn’t mind kind of telling me a little bit about some of your background and, you know, kind of where you grew up and eventually what kind of led you into, you know, wanting to pursue technology? Dalien: Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in Toledo, Ohio, Northwest Ohio area, not too far from Detroit, if you’re familiar. Born and raised there. Went to college there as well, University of Toledo. Go Rockets. And I got into tech. That’s a very, that’s a good question as, you know, when I was growing up, one of the most profound conversations I remember having relatively young, probably a freshman in high school. I remember a conversation I had with my father and my parents both graduated. They’re, you know, graduate college graduates. They actually met in college and I was probably around that age, probably, you know, it was expected to go to college coming from the family. But I didn’t really have a defined destination or what I was going to be going for. And so my father went for business. I was kind of defaulting towards that as a lot of college majors do. But understanding, and from a conversation I had with my father, he mentioned that, you know, I went to school for business and it did me well, but especially where he went into entrepreneurship, college was, you know, you don’t need a degree to be an entrepreneur. So if you’re going to pay for college and to do something like that, get something that we can specialize in. So he didn’t necessarily direct me towards technology or computer science, but he mentioned being a specialist, getting something that you can specialize in a particular field. So that conversation kind of resonated with me as I still remember it today, quite vividly. And later on through my hight school career, as I was getting educated, I, my mom signed me up, you know, as good mothers do, you know, push you towards things and support you on your way. And she signed me up for a tech summer camp. I think it was my junior year of high school. You know, I didn’t want to necessarily go, but you know, they said there’d be fun things to do. And, you know, mom was pushing me towards it. So I agreed. And actually the first day we went into that camp, it was, we were building, you know, gaming PCs. So it was my first hands-on experience with computers and technology. And, uh, through that initiative, actually we raffled off the computers that we worked on and lo and behold, I actually won the raffle. Uh, so I was able to get, come home with a nice build, which was my first own personal computer, which I cherished for many years. Still have it. It doesn’t necessarily get any use today, but it’s kind of sitting in the closet. Uh, but, uh, definitely a cherished heirloom. Uh, maybe I’ll pass it down to my kids one day. They’ll see it as a dinosaur. But, uh, uh, that was definitely something that intrigued me as going through that bootcamp kind of got me interested in tech and then getting in the computer, setting it up, understanding the different components, file explorer, going through file paths. Um, yeah, it really intrigued me and, you know, kind of got me prepped into, uh, computer science. Once I had to pick a, declare a major, it was kind of the de facto, I was doing a lot of computer stuff, gotten to gaming a little bit, uh, in high school and college. So it was just kind of the natural progression was interested in it. So I’m like, Hey, I’ll just make it a potential career. Manuel: And with that, so as you’re kind of, you know, you get introduced to it, I’m assuming it was pretty, you know, I remember the first time I built a PC, right. And it was kind of like, Oh, you have something tangible that you put together, you work. Um, you know, it starts to work and you’re also, you know, mentioned you’re digging around and file explorer. So it sounds like you were very curious, at least at that point. And is that something that you had like a natural curiosity to kind of learn more about things? Or is it really like, this is so new and interesting that, okay, maybe I want to dig into it a little bit deeper? Dalien: Yeah, well, so I guess it’s kind of a little bit of both. So it was kind of, it kind of stemmed from an understanding of, you know, once I got this computer, what can I do with it? I didn’t have my own personal computer. We had like a laptop, uh, uh, you know, cheap laptop that we had in the house. It was the family computer, but it wasn’t running anything, you know, other than RuneScape couldn’t really run any, uh, big games on it. So once I got this computer, um, it was just like, okay, what can I do with this? What’s, what’s capable? What kind of programs can I get without, uh, implicating myself? You know, I may have to get, uh, very creative in terms of how to get some of these games and different softwares. Uh, so it kind of got me interested in like, okay, how do I use this machine to the best of my abilities, right? I got to build with nothing on it other than windows. How do I actually turn this into something that I’m going to use regularly, um, in for school, for recreation? How am I going to leverage this machine that I was fortunate enough to win? So that kind of got me just interested in, all right, what’s capable? What can I do? What’s available? How do I set these things up? Cause then once you start running into issues, you know, I didn’t necessarily have a place to go to get things fixed or I didn’t have money to pay for someone to come help me fix my stuff. So a lot of YouTube, a lot of grinding and, you know, through trial and error, I was able to, you know, come up with something that was like, oh, this is actually pretty interesting and how it works. Manuel: So then now you get into college and, you know, you declare, you know, computer science major, were the classes that you took, do you think that they kind of helped continue to build that informational, you know, database or knowledge base that you had and, you know, kind of continue to move forward? Or was it like, you know, all right, this is cool. This is interesting. It’s helping me kind of understand, but I still really don’t know what I’m going to kind of do with it. Dalien: Yeah. So I’ll say it was kind of rough. My first couple of years in computer science, almost like deterred me from going into it as a full-time career. A lot of my early classes in the computer science field were on programming, you know, different languages. You’re learning some of the more basic languages. I had an assembly class that, so to this day, I don’t know how I passed, but a lot of different, different capabilities that I was not familiar with or comfortable with. So early on in my career or in my college days, it was, it almost made me pursue somethin...