Twenty years, plainly told.

Here's the honest version of how I got here. I was an art and English major who learned to build websites before it was really a job title. Job Service North Dakota gave me my first professional shot, supervising a team of web developers and figuring out on the fly what it means to lead people through technology problems. I had no idea that's what I'd spend the next two decades doing. From there I landed at Basin Electric Power Cooperative in Bismarck. I spent 16 years there, which tells you something. I started as the person responsible for IT training, teaching hundreds of employees how to use systems they needed to do their jobs or improve efficiency. That job taught me more about people than any leadership book I've read since. Eventually I moved into managing application teams. ERP systems, energy trading platforms, business intelligence tools, ETL. Big complicated stuff with real consequences when something breaks at 2am. By 2019 I was VP and CIO, managing a $51 million IT budget and a team of 105 people. Security, networking, help desk, application development, operational technology. Great teams and great people. I spent a lot of time in front of leadership translating technology into something a room full of non-technical people could actually make decisions about. In 2023 I moved to Noridian Healthcare Solutions to lead their security function. Federal compliance, NIST frameworks, penetration testing. Fully remote. Different kind of challenge. Now I'm at Everus Construction Group as Director of IT Support. We migrated 3,500+ devices into a new environment in the first year. Mostly I'm focused on building a team that knows how to learn together, not just fix things. The common thread through all of it isn't the technology. It's the people. Every role I've had, the part that actually mattered was whether the team trusted each other, understood why the work mattered, and felt like they could ask a dumb question without paying for it later. That's still what I'm working on. My resume is here if you need the formal version.