Google Search: Where is Ian Hudgins now?

The McClure School offers students direct connections to some of the world’s largest IT companies. The rigorous coursework and networking opportunities at the McClure School only enhance those connections and set up students for success in the future.  

Ian Hudgins graduated from Ohio University in 2005 with a BSC in the Communication Systems Management (COMT) track offered by the McClure School at the time. Similar to the ITS program offered today, COMT created the foundation of Hudgins’ career, and he is now a Program Manager at Google in Zürich, Switzerland. 

As an aspiring drummer at Norwayne High School in Wayne County, OH, Hudgins considered forgoing a higher education, but his family encouraged him otherwise. His eldest brother, Richard, was also a COMT major and guided him to the program, knowing Hudgins always had an interest in the quickly expanding technology sector, specifically computers. 

“He helped me understand what [was] going on behind the scenes and that got me interested in the program, and I got accepted,” says Hudgins. “That’s why I chose [COMT] as a major, kind of by chance, but in the end, it ended up fitting my interests quite well.” 

But that was only the beginning of how chance changed Hudgins’ career and life during his studies and long after. Following his junior year, Hudgins already received an internship offer from an IT company based in Cleveland when Barbara Moran, then Secretary of the McClure School, suggested he interview for an internship at Cincinnati Bell Telephone Company (CBT). 

“Doing interviews is a great learning experience even if you already have a job, or you think you have an offer on the table. If you have a chance to do an interview, always do the interview,” says Hudgins. “You never know what could happen. The worst case [is] you learned something and [the] best case [is] you actually get a better [offer].” 

Hudgins willfully approached the interview without feeling pressured, knowing he had another opportunity awaiting him. David Heimbach, ’99 ITS graduate, interviewed Hudgins, and he coincidentally also had a deep passion for music. Heimbach was looking for a drummer for a project he was working on at the time and the two connected immediately. 

Hudgins spent the summer interning with CBT and ended up working a part-time remote position throughout his senior year. Before graduating, CBT offered Hudgins a full-time position as Product Manager, and he began building the foundations for his career. 

As a Junior Product Manager, Hudgins was responsible for customer management and day-to-day audio-conferencing product support for clients, one being General Electric Aviation. Hudgins has spent his career adapting to new jobs, employees, and circumstances; at GEA, he wore a hard hat and drove a golf cart around and underneath the aircraft factory to monitor audio conferencing hardware. 

“Most of the critical junctions in my career, or changes that happened, were within that same kind of mindset, and I just said, ‘I'm going to be adaptable, see how this goes, and try to make it work’,” says Hudgins. “[I] ended up following the curve of technology as it changed and improved over time as well, adapting to that change and [adapting to] different scopes of work.” 

Hudgins changed directions after a year and a half at CBI when he decided to quit his job and move to New York City. Hudgins’ passion for music never wavered, and he continued to stay involved in music from his earlier college days playing in Athens bands, like Jimson LoFi and Tarantula Downpour, and further through his time playing for bands in Cincinnati on the side.

In a shared basement apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with no WiFi, his NYC music career getting off to a slow start, and a dwindling savings account, Hudgins sat in a nearby internet café applying to over 500 jobs in the IT industry. With limited experience in telecommunications at that point, he only received two interviews. White & Case, a successful international law firm, was one of the two companies and offered Hudgins a position as an audio visual (AV) technician. 

“What really enticed [White & Case] was that I knew all of the networking background behind everything because of the COMT degree,” says Hudgins. “They were looking for someone who [could] make this AV stuff work and sound/look good but with all of these systems becoming more interconnected, [White & Case] needed someone who could handle [connectivity] as well.”

Hudgins’ time at White & Case started when video and audio technologies were transitioning to a single network already consisting primarily of computers and phones. Hudgins realized White & Case needed major technological, global upgrades and took risks by speaking up directly to the firm’s Chairman with a plan. This risk-taking not only enhanced the way White & Case functioned and connected across the globe but landed Hudgins the Global Audio Visual Manager position. 

“[Risk taking] applies to projects and teams but also to your own career; you have to take risks when appropriate and learn from them, so the next one you take is more educated,” says Hudgins.

Throughout his eight years at the firm, Hudgins changed the company’s AV systems landscape and used rapid trial and error to implement the best technologies. With White & Case being an international firm, a large number of its IT infrastructure employees were located in Berlin, Germany, and Hudgins’ next journey began in Europe.  

“That time in Berlin was the marriage of all of my COMT and [AV development] work with all of the [infrastructure employees] to make [White & Case] a very robust and scalable global network of audio-visual services,” says Hudgins. 

After ten months in Berlin, Hudgins was then transferred to the firm’s London location to work side-by-side with the IT Director to continue expanding the company’s services. Hudgins was leading a global team of talented AV techs and had only been living in the U.K. for less than a year with his young family when he got a message on LinkedIn from a recruiter at Google.

At the time, Google was shifting its focus to expand its own first-party video conferencing technology and started building teams of experienced, successful AV personnel to join them. Hudgins, now with over eight years of AV service building experience, piqued Google’s interest, and he began Google’s in-depth interviewing process. 

Over the course of nine interviews, Hudgins discussed his technical background and knowledge as well as his ability to fit into Google’s work culture. Hudgins accepted his first position at Google in London as a Program Manager for Audio-Visual Engineering. Transitioning from project and people manager to program manager meant Hudgins had to shift focus from managing a few projects at a time to overseeing a whole portfolio of projects for Google’s services.  

“At that time when I was hired, I was hired with a lot of people around the world to do exactly the same thing, and it was to not only work with our engineers to design these systems and environments but then to scale them in such a way that they could repeat at massive scale with our infrastructure behind the scenes to operate it,” says Hudgins. 

Even in his new position as Program Manager, Hudgins continues to learn about new sectors within Google and expand his skills. 

With Google’s AV systems and deployments now able to scale easily, Hudgins then transitioned to Google’s Zurich, Switzerland office to repeat the same type of efforts for the company’s internal voice systems.  The transition to this type of programing was simple because of its similarity to the COMT curriculum in the early 2000s, which leaned heavily into VoIP telephony.  

Hudgins pulled from this background and it helped him to focus on deprecating older third-party solutions while developing new ideas and implementing at scale with Google’s own first-party systems. After five years in the Voice space at Google Hudgins was overseeing global support and deployments for many different voice solutions, from soft-phones to in-building cellular distribution systems.  The work that he and his team accomplished even provided the foundations for a new enterprise product offering from Google.

From there, it was time for a new journey for Hudgins. “I went from always focusing on internal Google systems, supporting them and making sure all Google employees could connect and use those systems at scale, and shifted gears to the product side of the business,” says Hudgins.  In 2021 Hudgins joined the Google Assistant team and now works side-by-side with software engineers and product managers developing, refining, and scaling the Mobile Assistant platform on Google’s own Pixel hardware.

For students interested in entering positions in large IT companies, Hudgins emphasizes the importance of versatility and being able to work with diverse groups of people to get the job done.  

“It’s about being adaptable to change and you have to remain very humble in your adaptability,” says Hudgins. “I found in my experience, if I’m just trying to relate with everyone and working with them, no matter who or where they are… treat them all the same, with respect and kindness,” says Hudgins.  

From his experiences in the States to those in Europe, Hudgins’ career has not only been shaped by the guidance he received from Ohio University but also the influence of IT & AV personnel and companies around the world. The ITS program transformed his career, connections, and life, opening him up to a world of possibilities— as it can for other motivated students at the McClure School. 

The McClure School of Emerging Communication Technologies strives to offer the best academic programs in the IT (Information Technology), the game development and the Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality (VR/AR) industries. Our programs and certificates cover numerous aspects of the rapidly changing industries of information networking, cybersecurity, data privacy, game development, digital animation and the academic side of esports.