Paul Webendorfer, Director of IT, ChangeUp Inc.

Did you always want to work in IT?

As far as career paths go, I am still weighing my options. I sincerely hope to make a decision before retirement, but the clock is ticking. Despite the fact that I have been working in IT for nearly 25 years, I had no aspirations of working in IT. I was actually planning for a career in financial law. Somewhere along the way, I took a job with a small local company, started helping with the fledgling IT department and the rest is history. Maybe I didn’t know what I really wanted to do or maybe it was just fate. Either way, I am blessed to have accidentally found a career that has provided me with so many challenges, so many rewards and so many opportunities to work with amazing people.

Throughout my career, my managers have primarily been on the business side of the organization, rather than the IT side of the organization. I think this factor helped form my “business first” IT philosophy. As a young man, just learning about business technology, enamored by technical bells and whistles, my boss gave me some excellent advice. He told me, “technology doesn’t mean a thing to us, if it doesn’t help the business.” This simple, practical advice set me on the right path of focusing on business solutions and not on the technology itself. To this day, I consider myself a business person working in IT, not an IT person working in business… and that has made a big difference for me.