A Non-Traditional Climb on a Career Ladder
“It can be hard to see just how much learning about business can impact your career, especially before you find yourself moving from a line worker to a manager and leader,” reflects Mark Freeman, a Certificate Program in Business Administration graduate and current senior vice president of technology at Catalyte, on his career journey.
“It takes understanding that it was not only your industry and hard technical skills that got you here, but also that learning how business works and how to lead your organization takes a whole new set of skills.”
For those also wanting to enhance their career path with our certificate, Mark offers this about his indirect route to achieve his career success:
“The program at UC Berkeley Extension was critical for my understanding and gave me the boost I needed to have a seat at the table. I am eternally grateful for the great mentorship I received and the guidance to take this leap.”
Mark grew up near Birmingham, Ala., and attended Jacksonville State University to study criminal justice and police science, not your typical path to a business or technology career. “For as long as I could remember, I wanted to be in law enforcement,” he tells me. “My intent was to eventually join the FBI.”
Learning From Life’s Curveballs
Things sometimes don’t go according to plan. But, in retrospect, those twists turned out to be for good reason.
“A fraternity brother of mine was working for a technical recruiting company,” says Mark of his first job after college. “I got a job there in 2000 and spent most of that year failing at being a recruiter. Sometimes failure is our greatest teacher! While I knew recruiting wasn’t for me, I was instantly attracted to the jobs I was recruiting for.”
That passion and drive for tech led Mark to Program Systems (later bought by Rural Computer Consultants, Inc.), where he provided phone support, installed their software and trained new users on their Liquid Fuel Dealer product—the beginnings of customer relationship management (CRM), accounting and dispatching software for propane and heating oil companies. “I loved it. Along the way, I started doing some programming in COBOL, as well as with the Palm Pilot. I knew that eventually I wanted to be a full-time programmer.”
After several years there, Mark was ready to move to his next long-term employer, McLeod Software, an industry leader in trucking and brokerage management software. Roles as an account manager and then a design analyst began to influence his desire to learn more about the business and management side of the industry.
“I quickly found that I was able to take my career as far as my effort would allow me, at least to a point,” he recalls. “A year or so after I started, there was a reorg and a new group was formed. I became a business/design analyst. I had already been working with the support team developers to learn Java programming and my new group was focused on doing customizations to our software, as well as continued support. My manager let me start writing code and eventually I got my Java certification and was allowed to move to a full-time programmer position.”
From design analyst to Java developer—as well as a mobile app architect—Mark moved up into the managerial role in the company’s custom programming group.
“My role in support—and later an analyst—made me better with customers than your average programmer,” Mark explains. “I had a unique understanding of our customer’s businesses, our own business and the technology behind all of it. “
In addition to honing his management and leadership skills, Mark also grew his technical résumé. He and a co-worker created a “skunkworks project” to build a mobile app for internal use. “This was the earlier days of Android and iPhone development and both of us were looking for something more to grow our skills. Eventually we built not only the initial internally facing app, but an interface to our enterprise product. It took off quickly, growing into our primary role. I got the chance to speak at user conferences and be part of a product from the ground up.”
The exposure of presenting and speaking on a product eventually led Mark to make his next big move to Catalyte.
Company Beliefs That Align With Professional Goals
After 10-plus years at McLeod Software, Mark began his climb at his current employer, Catalyte, taking on different roles and moving up through the organization.
“Catalyte was founded by Michael Rosenbaum, who is an economist, Harvard grad and former adviser to the Clinton administration,” Mark tells me. “The founder’s belief was that while aptitude is evenly distributed, opportunity is not. Michael tried to get the administration to act on training and hiring from non-traditional backgrounds (non-college grads) in technology, but it wasn’t fated to be. However, he believed in the idea enough that he raised funds and turned it into a business.
“Considering my own path into technology was non-traditional, I instantly fell in love with what the company was doing. We have an aptitude test that uses machine learning to predict whether someone will be a good developer—or in a number of other roles, now—and train them. We then place them on teams, pair them with more senior developers or sometimes place them directly with clients. My initial position had me leading a team of almost entirely junior engineers to build a vacation-rentals platform for a major hospitality company. It was eye-opening and such a great experience.”
The company also offered Mark and his wife the chance to move to the West Coast, something they had wanted to do for a few years. At the start of Mark’s nine-year career—and counting—at Catalyte, he was a principal technical lead, in which he performed general leadership and management and project support. In January 2018, Mark changed roles to become an engineering manager with 30-plus direct reports and the responsibility for resource management and team resource allocation.
He also began our Certificate Program in Business Administration.
In the years leading up to being in full-time management, Mark knew he needed to learn to think more strategically in order to succeed in his business-side career goals. The supervisor who hired him for leadership and who had completed his M.B.A. at UC Berkeley suggested Mark take some business classes and highly recommended our certificate program.
“The reputation along with the recommendation by my manager for this program truly made it stand out,” Mark says. “I wanted to select a school that had a reputation worth putting on my résumé.”
Not only was Mark looking to boost his résumé, but he was also considering the long-term benefits to his career and skill set. Our certificate courses offered both. And because he lives in Oregon, all of his courses were taken online.
“There were three courses that had a tremendous impact on my career,” he reflects. “I can especially see it now that I’m in executive leadership and the business aspects of my role are far greater than the technical.
“Basic Corporate Finance gave me the bigger picture on how companies make money and the overall view of business within our economic system. It has helped me when working with executive team members and finance, as well as to have a better understanding of the company’s financial health. The instructor provided video lessons each week and had regular office hours. These were especially helpful in a remote environment.
“Managerial Accounting,” he continues, “helped me to run my personal area of responsibility, seeing my resources—people and time—and being able to relate that to lessons in inventory management and costs of warehousing. I really hate it when people equate workers to widgets, but the mental separation that comes with that exercise does help you think more strategically about how you run your business.
“Finally, the elective Essentials of Management—the instructor was phenomenal. I really can’t say that loudly enough. I learned so much about the nuances of different personalities and managing people that I still encourage my managers to read the textbook we used in that course. This course was also live online via Zoom every week, which highly increased my engagement. It was so much fun to interact with other students.”
Successful Applied Knowledge on the Job
From the get-go, Mark was able to apply what he learned in class to his work. As he evolved with Catalyte’s needs, he struck a well-rounded balance being more effective with his people skills as well as more efficient on the business side and financials.
“I primarily work with technical individuals and the coursework showed me how to bridge the gap between senior management and technical staff,” he says, “while also coaching and helping them raise their corporate credit within the organization. Secondly, I was learning to operate my division more efficiently by considering things from an accounting perspective instead of just the people perspective.”
In April of 2019, Mark was promoted to director of development.
“In this continuation of my previous role, I began managing a team of managers and had the chance to build my own leadership team from scratch,” he tells me. “All of the lessons I learned through the coursework, combined with my firsthand experience as a manager, played a role in helping me to grow leaders within my own organization. My team took that further by designing a program to grow team leads through the ranks.”
Mark himself also continued to grow in his roles; After completing the program in 2020, he went from vice president in delivery engineering to senior technical program manager. Wanting to refocus his own goals in the technology field, in 2023 Mark rediscovered what got him there in the first place.
“I needed a break from leadership after a few hard years through the COVID period and, at the same time, Catalyte brought in new executive leadership,” Mark explains. “This gave me the opportunity to change roles for a while and focus on something I learned that I have a deep passion for—data.
“My time as a technical program manager was with our data and analytics team, helping define and monitor KPIs for our talent development division. My understanding of business propelled me forward through a better understanding of all of the moving pieces and the internal experience to glue it all together into a coherent story.”
Not only was Mark looking to boost his résumé, but he was also considering the long-term benefits to his career and skill set. Our certificate courses offered both. And because he lives in Oregon, all of his courses were taken online.
Then, late last year with the departure of Catalyte’s CTO, Mark stepped back into executive leadership with his current role as senior vice president of technology.
“With the added responsibility of now managing IT infrastructure and internal platform development teams, the lessons I learned in Basic Corporate Finance are more important than ever,” he says.
But even as a senior vice president of technology, Mark plans to keep growing and helping the company and the people he manages continue their own growth.
“My immediate goals are to see Catalyte succeed at bringing opportunity to those who have the ability to learn but haven’t had the opportunity to prove it,” Mark states. “It’s wonderful working for a company that has a strong mission-driven culture and the chance to make a real change in people’s lives.
“Selfishly, I also think I’m right where I need to be to learn the lessons that will take me to the next step. I continue to learn about business and leadership every day. We’re in a time of technological growth the world hasn’t seen since the widespread introduction of the internet, and I’m excited to be part of that change. I think we’re all going to be working to determine where we fit as the technology industry—and every other industry—evolves.”