Q&A on a public sector consulting role with Red Hatter Cait Macleod

Cait Macleod is a consultant with the Services team in Canberra, Australia. As a resident engineer in the public sector consulting team, Cait provides expert advice to our customers across various projects or engagements, supporting the successful uptake of Red Hat systems and acting as an ambassador for open source culture. Our Talent Acquisition team chatted with Cait to learn more about their role, team and where we can find them when they’re not helping clients solve their tough technical problems through open source technology.

How long have you been a Red Hatter, and what made you decide to apply for your current role?

I’ve been with Red Hat since 2019. I previously worked as a cyber security engineering team lead for an Australian government client. A couple of Red Hat consultants were part of that team too, and I really liked working with them. So when I saw a job come up, I chatted with them about what life at Red Hat was like and decided to apply.

One of the things I like about Red Hat is that it's an open source company at the core. Although it’s a profit-based company, there’s an added element of social good and a strong base mission that I can call back on.

Did you study a specific course or degree to get into this line of work?

I studied for a Bachelors of IT at the Australian National University, and during my studies, I did what’s called a digital cadetship, where I was placed in a government agency while still completing my degree part-time. During the cadetship, I was able to get really good workplace and technical experience while still completing my degree. Because the cadetship was on a rotational basis, it was a good grounding for my current role; as a consultant, you move around a lot from engagement to engagement. After graduating, I got a role in that same agency as a team lead.

How did the skills from your previous role translate into your current role at Red Hat?

I came from a Python development and security engineering background, which is slightly different to most of the people in my team. But there is definitely room in Consulting for people with different backgrounds who would like to expand their skill set. My previous role was also a really useful base for the non-technical skills needed as a consultant - being able to make connections in the client team has been a really extremely useful skill, understanding processes, considering assumptions, being able to present effectively and being able to work in a team. 

I already had experience in Linux security, identity management and software development, and after joining Red Hat, I was given the ability to do the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) and Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) training. I also found that my skill set translated  easily over to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and a little bit into Red Hat OpenShift too, although I found the latter a little bit more challenging.

Do you work from home, from an office, or both?

It varies. At the moment my engagement is onsite at the client, five days a week. But I’ve worked one day from home in previous engagements. I personally prefer to work in an office if I can, so this role is well suited to me. I also go into the Red Hat office every once in a while.

What’s the Canberra office like?

Our colleagues are really nice, and we get to have good chats and social events. And there are snacks!

We've got monthly meetings and regular "cake o'clock" for people whose birthdays or Red Hat anniversaries are coming up in the office. I went out to a fancy dinner with a few of my colleagues the other night. Our office manager is really lovely and she organizes a lot of events. Recently we had a talent competition, where I got to demonstrate a speedrunning session of my favorite video game. Our social team also organized a Mario Kart tournament recently, though I didn't quite win. I got a box of chocolates, but the winner got a big plushie of Toad from Mario Kart, which was very impressive. We did get to rematch the Mario Kart tournament at our Christmas party, which was at a video game bar.

What makes your role as a consultant unique?

I’ve personally found that Red Hat consultants have a very trusted and broad role. We have the opportunity to support the customer’s success holistically, using a variety of products and engaging with other open source products and methodologies often.

There's also a lot of ability to reach back into Red Hat and talk to the support and engineering teams. We have internal Slack spaces for most of our products, so when I’m facing some kind of issue, I've been able to find people who have dealt with a similar challenge and talk through it.

The unique thing about Red Hat as a whole is that it's primarily made up of people who care a lot about open source software. Many of us have completely unrelated technical hobbies or side projects that are really interesting to hear about. There's a monthly "Check on Tech" presentation in the office in Canberra, where consultants will come in and talk about something that they've been working on recently. We had a talk about regular expressions recently, and I recall another being about open source software and drivers for their personal computers (PCs).

What does career progression look like in your team?

There are a few options for progression, both within the Consulting team and in Red Hat. The individual contributor (IC) track within the Consulting team involves starting off as a Junior or Associate Consultant, moving to Consultant and then up to Senior or Principal Consultant. The more senior consulting roles involve more architecture, team leading, planning and specialization in particular products.

There are also other complementary roles in Customer Success and Technical Sales. You could move to an Account Solution Architect or a Technical Account Manager role; these are roles where you will work closely with the same customer over time, and get to really understand their architecture and challenges.

Overall it depends on your interests. The consultant role is a good fit for me as I’m personally not so interested in the sales side of things; some consultant clients also tend to have longer term engagements, as opposed to Architects who tend to deal with shorter, more high-paced engagements - which is great if you’re after that, but I personally prefer to work with the same client over a longer period.

Are there any particular challenges or highlights of your career journey so far?

One of the highlights was that during early Covid I went into the Covid center of operations for the Australian Government Services Australia agency. This was before I was consulting within Services Australia. I was just brought in to connect, be on the ground, and listen and learn about how Red Hat were supporting them. I was also able to help identify where Red Hat could help to enable their mission. It was very interesting as this was the agency that was supporting Covid payments for people who were affected by it, and they had to scale up massively, quickly and safely. That was really intense and really cool.

Over time the main challenge for me has been building the technical confidence to present, communicate and fix particular problems. It's much easier to say “I know a little bit about that thing” than “I know a lot about that thing.” But with time, training and access to internal documentation and knowledge, I've been able to really develop at resolving particular issues for customers, deepen my understanding of the technology underneath, and be able to confidently come away and say “I actually know quite a lot about this.” It’s a continuing process, though, as there’s always new technology to learn about (and Red Hat has a pretty large product portfolio).

What’s your approach to solving customer problems?

I prefer to dig into the problem myself as a starting point. But I usually time-box it so I make sure that I'm not spending an entire week troubleshooting something that I could have asked for help with. I also document things that I've fixed in the past, which helps as well in case I or a colleague run up against a similar issue.

Where can we usually find you outside of work?

I recently learned how to crochet which is a great fidget. I've been making little coffee cups with cats in them, and a little dragon pouch.

I also enjoy Python coding, so I'm engaged in the open source tech community a fair amount. I go to Australian Python conferences and volunteer to help them run from time to time, so I get to watch a lot of talks about other people doing interesting things with open source technology. I haven't given any longer conference presentations recently, but am planning on it.

I've given short talks about mental health and mindfulness using video games at Linux Conf AU and PyCon AU, as well as internal Red Hat tech events.

I usually use our Red Hat recharge days to catch up on my weekend chores that I've been putting off for several weeks - like just cleaning or doing the lawn, which means I get more recovery time on the weekend. But my cat is always very pleased that I am home to cuddle him by surprise. It's a good day to just disconnect because most of the company is off on the same day, so barely anyone sends any emails. 

What advice would you give to someone interested in a role in Consulting at Red Hat?

Researching Red Hat’s products is a great way to go about finding the ones that you think you'd be really interested in working with. If you've done any projects with them before that you can talk about, that’s useful as well. If you do have a hobby that’s connected to tech, then it's great to talk about as well - it shows that you are passionate.

Some of the skills that I think we often undervalue in ourselves when thinking about this kind of role are also the hardest for many people to work on building! Some of them are hard to identify in yourself until others point out how much they appreciate them. If you have these core multiplying skills already, but are a little short on some technical depth, I think emphasizing them in applications can really help buff out the areas that you just need a little hands-on experience to build.

About our Consulting team

Red Hat consultants play an integral role in the customer experience by helping companies adopt new technologies and modernize their IT strategies. You can read more about our Consulting team here and search our open roles here.