Leadership depth
Keep improving delegation, coaching, accountability, communication, hiring judgment, and the ability to create consistent execution through other people.
Now • August 2026
Building capability without forcing a premature career pivot.
My current priority is to become stronger at the intersection of operations and technology. I already have management experience and hands-on experience with operational systems, reporting, inventory tools, and data accuracy. The work now is broadening that technical fluency and systems thinking without pretending I need to start over from zero.
Current priorities
Technical fluency
Build outward from tools I already use—POS, inventory, ordering, reporting, Excel, and digital recordkeeping—into networking, web infrastructure, automation, software, and broader systems support.
Career leverage
Build evidence of useful skills and operating judgment so future opportunities can include stronger management roles, process and inventory work, systems support, implementation, and technology-enabled operations.
Existing systems foundation
I am not starting from zero.
My interest in technology also predates my management career. I began college studying Computer Science at East Carolina University before transferring to Penn State and changing academic direction.
Today, my day-to-day work already involves computerized point-of-sale, inventory, ordering, reporting, scheduling, payroll, and recordkeeping systems. I regularly work with counts, audits, discrepancies, operational reports, and the information needed to keep a store accurate and controlled.
I have also used NCR point-of-sale systems, PDI Retail Site Management, Microsoft Excel, Word, Outlook, and other digital business tools. That is not the same as formal IT experience, but together with my earlier coursework it gives me a more credible technical foundation than simply starting from scratch.
Learning by doing
This website is part of the process.
Building mattkwalker.com has required working with a custom domain, DNS records, HTTPS, GitHub Pages, HTML, CSS, deployment, metadata, and basic web infrastructure.
That does not make me an IT professional or software engineer. It gives me a practical way to learn how technical pieces fit together instead of only reading about them.
I want more of that kind of learning: small, useful systems that teach me something real and compound into stronger technical judgment over time.
What I'm not doing
Avoiding fake progress.
I am not trying to collect random certifications, build projects I do not care about, or present myself as more technical than I am.
The standard is usefulness: learn skills that connect to real work, document what I actually understand, and keep moving toward roles where operations knowledge and technical capability reinforce each other.
Likely direction
FoundationOperations leadership
→
BuildSystems + technical fluency
→
TargetTechnology-enabled operations