Careers rarely move in a straight line. The people who grow fastest aren’t the ones with the cleanest path. They’re the ones who keep choosing to learn after everyone else has stopped.
That’s the thread running through this episode of Culture and Career Corner, where host Anamika sat down with Phoenix Chaubey, Senior System Administrator, and Himanshu “Hardy” Arora, Technical Trainer, both based in ITBD’s India office.
Two Different Starting Points
Hardy’s path started at level one, eight years ago, doing laptop and desktop support with Hewlett Packard through Wipro. From there: subject matter expert, team lead, process trainer. Then a move to TXC Technologies as a technical training lead, managing multiple trainers and training analysis across accounts in India. Last year, a friend told him about a company called IT By Design. The name itself caught his attention before anything else did.
That’s the observation worth sitting with. Hardy didn’t join for a title or a jump in pay. He joined because the name suggested something about how the company operates, and he did his own research before deciding it was worth the move.
Phoenix’s path looks different on paper but rhymes in substance. He built his expertise in Microsoft 365, Azure, Intune, Endpoint Management, and Cybersecurity by staying inside the harder problems rather than around them. Ask him what ITBD’s culture feels like and he doesn’t reach for a slogan. He describes an environment where people are willing to help and share knowledge, where the challenges themselves became the growth.
Culture as a Mechanism, Not a Perk
Here’s what matters: neither of them described culture as a perk. They described it as a mechanism.
Hardy put it plainly. Small impact creates big changes. He pointed to the company’s values, its service standards, its Life by Design sessions, even something as small as a recent Father’s Day celebration. Not one big gesture. A pattern of small ones, repeated often enough that people notice.
Two concrete examples came up that show this pattern in action rather than just describe it. The first was a Life by Design session on Adaptability Quotient, led by Sunny, that Anamika singled out as one of her favorites. Her point was simple: everyone talks about EQ and IQ, but AQ, the capacity to adapt, gets overlooked even though it may matter just as much for how someone handles a changing environment.
The second was smaller in scale but just as telling. Hardy’s own training team started an internal initiative where trainers take turns teaching each other specific AI tools, one tool, one trainer, one session at a time. No mandate from above. Just people closing their own knowledge gaps by teaching each other.
Anamika added the piece that makes all of this more than a nice sentiment: this same collaborative culture holds across India, the Philippines, and the US. Different time zones, different offices, and by her account, the distance doesn’t show up in how people actually work together.
TCW: The Turning Point
Then the conversation moved to TCW, the internal training experience both host and guests describe as a turning point. Not incremental. A reset. The kind of four or five days that changes how someone reacts to a problem versus how they respond to it. Phoenix hasn’t attended yet. Hardy’s response was immediate: next cohort, you’re in.
That’s the shift right there. Culture isn’t the mission statement on the wall. It’s a colleague pulling you into the next training before you even ask.
The Life Lessons
The most revealing part of the episode, though, wasn’t about ITBD directly. It was the life lessons.
Hardy’s three: stay curious, because the moment you stop learning is the moment you fall behind everyone still investing in themselves. Believe that your thoughts shape your outcomes, a principle he ties to the book The Secret and keeps written on his mousepad as a daily reminder. And if you want to be in the one percent, do what the one percent does. For him, that meant stepping back from social media entirely and reinvesting that time in learning, podcasts, and audiobooks.
He backed the manifestation point with a personal story. On a family trip in Himachal, riding back through an IT park in Chandigarh, he half-joked to his mother about wanting to work there someday. He later landed a job in that same city, at ITBD.
Phoenix’s three ran close in spirit: never stop learning, because standing still means falling behind in a fast-moving field. Build strong relationships, because technical skill without collaboration, communication, and support for colleagues and family only gets you so far. And embrace challenges, treating mistakes as the fastest teacher rather than something to avoid.
Closing Reflection
Anamika closed with two reflections of her own, both earned rather than borrowed.
The first came from a genuinely rough stretch: losing a wallet with roughly ten to eleven cards’ worth of ID across two countries. She noticed herself slipping into a “why me” mindset before catching it and reframing it as “try me.” The lesson wasn’t about the wallet. It was what the disruption forced her to see, that she needed to slow down, prioritize, and stop letting work-related worry crowd out everything else.
The second was broader: growth doesn’t happen in a comfort zone. She tied this directly to her own move to the Philippines two years ago, and to the idea that real change requires giving something up before you get to go up, whether that’s proximity to family, a habit, or simply comfort itself. She named resilience as the thread underneath both of these lessons, calling it a superpower in its own right.
Let me bring this together. Two different starting points, two different technical tracks, and yet the same underlying pattern: curiosity that doesn’t switch off, small consistent actions instead of one big promise, and a willingness to treat discomfort as the price of growth rather than something to avoid. That’s not a coincidence. That’s what the name is supposed to mean.
