Talk About Equal Parts Thrilling and Terrifying, Why I Recently Changed Industries

This October I left the printing industry to join the technology industry to work for Recovery Point Systems. Funny enough October also marked my 24th year working in the printing industry – one of the first forms of technology and which in the US is a $70.1 billion industry – print is not disappearing anytime soon. So why did I leave?

A good question and one that does not have a linear answer. It requires a bit of back story…

Twenty-six years ago I started working at a trade association handling their data entry and data integrity as a lowly membership assistant. I gained a true appreciation for how data drives everything – good data drove revenue and bad data drove systems to failure. Coincidentally this timeframe is when the internet became a “thing.” About two weeks into that job I realized that my college major should have been in Computer Science.

I shifted that same year into an IT role within that same organization, handling websites for the member organizations, marketing the services and creating the websites. I loved it. The only downside was my commute…it could and did routinely take up to 2 hours to go 20 miles.

When I saw the ad for an HTML Programmer at a printing company that was 2 miles from home, I applied. What did I have to lose except a really horrific commute? Lucky me, I was hired as part of a two-person HTML programming team, back when if you wanted a “fancy” website it was created by embedding tables within tables. We were tucked away in a back office selling and supporting websites and hosting them for our printing customers.

Fast forward through a career path that took me into management, sales, leadership and then back to enterprise sales – all within the print industry. It was a fabulous career path that afforded me a chance to meet and mentor with many talented and intelligent people. Each person who was a part of my journey taught me something. Thank you.

That brings us to 2020. When a chance arose to return to a sales role in technology with a Gartner recognized industry leader, I decided it was time to get back to my roots. Recovery Point Systems is a company that focuses on business process resilience services including DRaaS, IaaS and BaaS – we ensure that our client’s systems and tools are available no matter the circumstances.

I would love to hear from each and every one of you reading this – drop me a note to say hi or DM me and we can get on a call. 

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Katie Clark is Account Executive at Recovery Point Systems, a nationally recognized leader for business resilience solutions.