Heroes of IT – Automox University: Jack Milburn’s Guide to Ongoing IT Education, E07

In this episode of the Heroes of IT podcast, Ashley interviews Jack Milburn, a senior IT engineer with a focus on cloud security. They discuss Jack's experience with Automox and how he uses it for patching and vulnerability scanning. They also talk about Automox University (AXU) and the value of online learning in bridging the skills gap in IT. Jack shares his journey of earning certificates and the different levels of complexity in AXU courses. They also touch on the importance of company culture in promoting continuous learning.

Creators & Guests

Host

Ashley Smith

Ashley Smith isn't just the voice behind the Heroes of IT podcast, she's a beacon for customer satisfaction and engagement. With her roots deeply planted in customer marketing, Ashley brings an unparalleled passion for nurturing strong, impactful relationships. At Automox, she ensures IT heroes are equipped, supported, and celebrated. Her episodes are treasure troves of insight, packed with real-world successes and solutions to the toughest challenges in IT. Ashley has a knack for getting IT practitioners to open up, making her interviews a gold mine for anyone wanting to grasp the intricacies of IT.

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Ashley (00:00)
Welcome to the Heroes of IT podcast, where here at Automox we interview people who we consider to be our heroes of IT. Today we have Jack Milburn with us. Welcome, Jack.

Jack Milburn (00:10)
Hiya.

Ashley (00:12)
Great to have you here.

Ashley (00:28)
So for those of you who don't know Jack, Jack is one of our Automox customers. And he's actually a connoisseur of earning certificates, whether that is an Automox Essentials certificate or he's earned a litany of other ones. And we have him here today to talk about both Automox University and the skills gap in IT. I'm very excited to jump into our conversation today.

But before we do that, why don’t you just give us a quick background and introduce yourself.

Jack Milburn (01:02)
So I'm Jack. I'm a senior IT engineer with a focus around cloud security. I've been doing this for about 15 years now and developed kind of a unique set of skills, which is also broad due to the strategy work I do. I joined the company that I work for, Computer Care, probably eight months ago and then kind of been on a certificate journey just before that.

to basically support my development and upskilling around security especially.

Ashley (01:35)
Can you give us a list of all of the certificates that you've earned recently?

Jack Milburn (01:40)
So it's a mix of my classes like proper certificates and obviously like tools that we use so Automox:

all three, Trend, basically everything that they offer, are another tool we use, so Risma, a couple of Security Ninja certificates as well as all those AZ SC-MS900, working on AZ-104 currently. So they're like over the last couple of months, which I've achieved just based off of.

Obviously expanding into cloud security as well as the tools we use and developing them as basically the owner of the product within our company.

Ashley (02:25)
Yeah. Awesome. That's great. So let’s kick off with your background with Automox. I know that you said that you’re newer to the company that you work at. I feel like eight months is kind of the sweet spot where you know everyone and you know how processes work and you’re kind of just starting to get your hands dirty with it. So how do you use Automox?

Jack Milburn (02:49)
So, Automox was taken on board by my boss originally and then I was brought into it to manage and run it. Basically set the standards, set the requirements, make sure it works for the customers in the way we require it to work. So, it’s basically utilizing it to do all of our patching across the board. Mixed in with our vulnerability scanning tool called Cyrisma that we basically wrote some scripts to basically export in the way you guys want to have it imported to be able to run other

remediations against it. So we use it to basically remediate front run abilities, get ahead of patching. So Cyber Essentials Plus requires you to have like a 14 day patching window. So we basically wanted to make it as easy as possible to make sure no patches expanded out of that. So a bit of upfront.

heavy lifting to basically get all these patching when you onboard a customer up to date and then basically just maintains itself really easily. We run into very few issues with it and then when we run into an issue we just basically use a Worklet to manage it through creating a script or using the ones that you guys have developed.

Ashley (04:04)
Yeah, that’s awesome. Yeah, the Worklet Catalog is such a beast and I feel like almost everyone at Automox has touched it in some way, whether that’s...

creating the actual Worklets and scripting them and coming up with new ideas, testing them, even on the marketing team, revamping what the catalog looks like and trying to make it a better user experience for our customers. think that’s where we see a lot of value coming out of Automox.

Jack Milburn (04:37)
Yeah, I’d agree. lot of it, a lot of those extra caveats come off of that and other people putting in the effort as well. We’ve just been investing some time and spoken to actually the support team about how we can make sure that like Dell and HP patching is covered off as well. So like those.

You know, the tools that run, you’ve got those specific drivers and things like that. You want to kind of make sure up to date very early on. We’ve basically just been speaking to your team about it and putting some scripts together to basically build a Worklet. And then they put it in as a request as well in the long term to basically upscale what we can do in the capabilities to support us in using it as well.

Ashley (05:18)
Yeah, the custom Worklets are really, really cool. It’s incredible. I am not a bash or PowerShell scriptor myself, but I have a lot of respect for people that do use those tools. I know I couldn’t do it, but I’m very glad that they do.

Okay, so let’s talk about AXU. For those of you who don’t know what AXU is, it’s Automox University. It’s where we put a lot of our online learning. And we like to say that you can essentially get up to speed with Automox exclusively through Automox University. You don’t really need a dedicated CSM. You don’t need copious amounts of in-person training. We like to think that you could do it all remotely through AXU.

so Jack, I’d love to hear about how you first got interested in the courses there and kind of where your learning path took you.

Jack Milburn (06:15)
So it was more, it was definitely about learning the best ways to use the tool. When someone writes an instruction manual, you tend to go towards it rather than recreating it over and over again for your team as well. So I adopted it, thought, you know, if I’m going to ask someone in my team to do the same work.

Ashley (06:22)
Mm

Jack Milburn (06:34)
I’ve got to do it first type thing and do the recommendations see what they recommend. So I worked for it like that basically to prove that I understood it internally so I could then recommend it to customers as well. I’ve done most I’ve done the certificates and then looked through some of the courses as well but because I’m using it every day because I’m developing in it because I’m building it up it’s mainly the key things that I don’t understand or I’m not sure the best way to do that.

go and then pick up but the team one of my team members that works on this with me is working through the courses because he has less hands-on because he’s doing the

the day-to-day like tick box exercises rather than the actual widespread of like designing it, setting the standards type thing across it. So they’ve been really helpful. What did catch me off guard is the 50 questions you have to answer in the certificate, which is always a, you I say about it not being a proper exam, but it is so it’s quite in depth and thorough. it definitely checks your knowledge to make sure you know what you’re talking about.

Ashley (07:40)
Yeah, definitely. One of my things on my to-do list for this next month is to start certificate courses. And I’m a little scared of them. I know they’re like real exams and they’re very in-depth. But...

haven’t taken a school course in a very long time. So it’ll be good to flex the muscle again. For those of you listening in and haven’t explored AXU or the certificate courses, there are three different courses and they kind of vary in the amount of complexity and skill required to pass each one. So we start off with level one and then you progress to level two. And they recently came out with a level three.

Jack, could you kind of give some color to the differences between levels one and two and two and three?

Jack Milburn (08:35)
that’s a little bit of a test off the top of my head. So it takes it from understanding kind of like the GUI and how you would use it to just like create a policy to then being how you would create a custom policy that specifically targets like patch Tuesdays for Windows updates, which is something they’ve just covered off in a blog as well.

to support that. So, you know, do you want to patch them early? Do you want to patch them late? Things like that and making it more specific around what packages you’re going to use and select and basically,

ticking a lot of boxes rather than just doing a general, this is a critical update. This is how you basically apply it to a group. And then in the third part, you start working towards like Worklets. So these are scripts that people have developed or the guys at Automox have developed, able to support other things. So if a device is 30 days plus out of use, then you can just run this command against it or schedule it and it will just remove those. So you’re not being billed against it. You haven’t got things skewing your patching.

in the system so it makes it really organized keeps your house in order so to speak.

Ashley (09:47)
Yeah, definitely. think speaking to the team, our Automox University team and customer success team, Automox works a lot with

really small, really lean IT teams that can range from one person to three to maybe it’s a larger team of five or 10 people, but they each have so many responsibilities that we are finding that I think a lot of IT teams will have one super user for each tool. then things happen, like someone gets sick, they go on maternity or paternity leave, they get a different opportunity.

they get promoted. And then it’s like, okay, well, how do you transfer all of that knowledge from one tool to someone else? And I think that Automox University does a really great job of trying to make everyone in line with that, that knowledge of being a super user. I know that right now in IT, there’s a lot of conversation around there being like a skills gap in IT.

and, know, having those super hyper niche specialized super users, and how it may not extend to the entire team. especially with the growth of, you know, SaaS products that are developed to, to kind of tackle one very specific problem. I’d love to get your take on, you know, the skills gap and how you stay ahead of that. And, you know, if you’ve seen any impact on, on your team or people that you’ve worked with before.

Jack Milburn (11:30)
So I’d say a lot more previously, I’ve been quite lucky when I joined Computer Care that a lot of people have a little bit of different focus. Obviously, we’re primarily Azure users, so Microsoft Entra focused, Azure focused. So we have a lot of their courses, for example, overlap, but then you have specialization. like our

Our team is segregated to a degree where if it’s something that’s like conditional access or role-based action control, I would focus on it. But if it’s building a VM, it might be someone else. But they kind of overlap so everyone understands. no one just specializes until it gets to like the very top tier. So it spreads your team in a way that you’re able to cover loads of different areas and split your resources. But a lot of the time in the past, you ended up with

people, especially in the lower tiers like the first and second line, the development is really hard to get the exposure but with automation I feel like it’s becoming easier so you can automate those laptop creations, those password resets, those things like that, like the patching, you’re not having to manage every day and that then gives you the ability to learn, study and progress up your career rather than focusing on the things that you know are kind of like very low system admins.

things rather than that first second line and be able to get the development in. as much as I felt like there was larger skill gaps before and there still is, it depends on how a company approaches it as well. So it’s just about understanding what you want and taking on board those bits and actually pursuing what you’re interested in as well, but also making sure you align with what your company’s dynamic is as well. So if they have a set requirement, go after that, but then utilize that

Ashley (12:59)
Yeah.

Jack Milburn (13:19)
to then go after something you want so you can cover both off.

Ashley (13:24)
Yeah, definitely. think that company culture probably plays a larger factor than any of us are aware of. I know.

Some companies will give stipends to go out and do specific courses or have learning platforms. know at Automox we do have a specific learning platform that we’re free to use for however many hours and they really encourage us to go out and do it.

There are courses for our marketing team. There’s courses for our sales team. There’s courses to get technical for software engineers and support and CSMs. So everyone has their own little specific piece of learning on there, which I think I really appreciate.

But I think that’s a really, really great takeaway for anyone listening who finds themselves dealing with a skills gap is how can you incorporate that learning into your culture on your team?

Jack Milburn (14:34)
I agree.

Ashley (14:36)
Awesome. Well, Jack, thank you so much. This has been an awesome conversation. If anyone is listening and they find themselves curious on the certificates that Jack continues to collect, definitely go ahead, connect with him on LinkedIn. Maybe challenge yourself to try and earn a couple as well. Thank you so much for this conversation, Jack. It’s been awesome.

Jack Milburn (15:02)
Thanks very much for having me.