“Happy people can look back and say they chose their life, not settled for it.”

– Shannon L. Alder

Everyone has different circumstances which drive their decisions in life. However, we all are so fortunate to live in America where we have the freedom of choice. As fellow veterans, you are aware of the sacrifices our brothers and sisters-in-arms have made to allow us that freedom. After fighting for your country, why settle for anything less than the ability to exercise that option?

As you begin your transition from the military, you have undoubtedly been told one or more of the following “rules”:

• You have to be really flexible in location preferences to get a decent job.
• You have to be realistic in your income expectations – remember you are just starting out in a new job.
• Your most valuable asset is your leadership, so your ideal job is project management.

Those rules are fine for some people, and that is their choice. If these are rules you can live by, then stop reading this article now and go back to checking your FB feed for cat videos. But if you are like me and do not want to settle and be bound by these rules, then keep reading.

I knew that working in an office from 9-5 for a mediocre salary, in another town that I did not want to live in, was not my way to happiness. As I began my transition, I started looking into sales primarily because of the meritocracy of that aspect of business. You get paid based on the work you put in. Then I began to focus on the tech industry because of its continuing growth and impact in our everyday lives. Shortly after updating my LinkedIn profile accordingly, I received a phone call from Justin Ossola at Tech Qualled and the rest is history. If you’ve read my previous articles, you know all about that, but what happened when the dust settled? Was it everything I dreamed about? Short answer – YES!

I’m currently a Field Sales Account Executive at a national IT solutions provider. I absolutely believe in my company’s mission, and I have the best coworkers and mentor anyone could ask for. The best part – I get to work remotely which allows me the flexibility to spend time with my husband (on his crazy schedule, as he is still an active duty Army Officer). Do I have to perform at a very high level?  Are there leadership challenges? Absolutely! But I’m excited to wake up each morning and learn something new every single day. Tech Qualled prepared me with the resources, knowledge base, and skill set to successfully transition to this fast paced industry. They also ensured that we knew how to correctly leverage our non-tangible skills such as leadership, public speaking, and a commanding presence, to have successful customer engagements and close deals.

You don’t have to settle for being stuck in the 9-5. You absolutely can have control over your future. If you have ever thought about sales or the tech industry reach out to Tech Qualled today at www.staging.techqualled.flywheelsites.com.

I had a client approach me recently with a question about military veterans in Corporate America:

“How resilient are military veterans and how will they deal with rejection?….because it’s an inevitable component of B2B sales.”

In my experience running a veteran-centric training company, I’ve found that two major factors lead to a veteran’s ability to cope with rejection: veterans have stress-tested leadership experience and a healthy amount of pride.

One glaring misnomer about the military is that veterans may not react to rejection well because when they were in the military they had instruction manuals for how to solve every problem they could possibly face. It is true that there are a ridiculous number of publications and tech manuals at your disposal, however, this couldn’t be further from the truth. On a Navy ship, this is how problem-solving situation would typically play out for a division officer or senior enlisted leader. First, a piece of equipment breaks and everyone freaks out. The Captain and your Department Head authoritatively warn you that we cannot maintain our operational capabilities without this vital piece of equipment. “Fix it as soon as possible” they would exclaim! Second, you huddle up with your senior enlisted leaders and any technical resources you can pull in. Everyone comes in with a diversity of experiential advice, and as the leader, everyone is looking to you to synthesize these inputs and make sound decisions under pressure. So you leverage the resources you have, diving into tech manuals while listening to the experts around you; identify a root cause (probably not just one); work with Supply to procure parts which often are halfway around the world; and adjust your personnel and resources to compensate for the recently discovered degradation. Third, you stand up in front of the entire ship and brief your plan of action which typically gets rejected a few times before a positive consensus builds around your efforts. Every day leaders of all branches of the military, both officer and enlisted, experience rejection, pushback and pressure from stakeholders.

Lastly, military veterans are proud. A servicemember’s reputation within his or her command is probably the most important aspect of the job, and each day a significant amount of time and energy is dedicated to maintaining and growing that reputation. During the military-to-civilian transition, this pride-driven approach to the workplace does not diminish. If anything, new “civilian” challenges provide us with a fresh canvas on which to build our newfound brand. Furthermore, veterans hate losing. When put into a competitive environment, veterans all want to be the best at what they do. They are typically honest about their shortcomings and thrive when given feedback from management – because we know just how important having an element of self-criticism can be to the greater mission. Whether rejection hits us in the face like a freight train or threatens us with a slow death, something pulls at us to stand back up and say, “what’s the next step?” This courage in the face of fear and failure, I believe, stems from pride.

It’s hard to say if military veterans cope with rejection so well because of their collective experiences, particularly in the military, or because it’s in their DNA. Whether it’s a learned skill or an inherent trait is more or less irrelevant. Transitioning veterans wake up and expect things to break down, and we have become accustomed to preparing for the worst while driving for the best. This is where we thrive; it’s what we expect. So yah, I think veterans take rejection pretty darn well.

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This article was co-authored by Justin Ossola and Katie Goossen.

Justin Ossola is the co-founder of Tech Qualled, a boutique training and placement company dedicated to preparing transitioning veterans for success in the high tech space. He is a 13-year Navy veteran, U.S. Naval Academy and Harvard graduate and a former Oracle sales consultant.

Katie Goossen is the Candidate Success Manager for Tech Qualled. She is a former Air Force veteran, graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy and University of Oxford, and a proven Human Resources leader now leveraging her experience to help transitioning veterans launch into a successful civilian career.

For more on Tech Qualled, visit www.staging.techqualled.flywheelsites.com.

When you interview a Tech Leader with over 35 years of high-tech sales and leadership experience, you get answers. Direct, pragmatic, well-informed answers. But in this case, they were also highly personal.

Read this one-on-one with Tech Qualled CEO, Jim Sherriff, and you’ll see what I mean.

Q: What led you to start Tech Qualled (TQ)?

A: For many, many years, my wife Karen and I have felt very strongly that the United States government and corporate America have not done enough for veterans as they transition back into their civilian lives. With our all-volunteer army, we have hundreds of thousands of people making conscious decisions and personal sacrifices to serve their nation, and I think we have to do more. So that’s fundamentally what drove me to look for options.

Then I started looking at what I could do personally, and what my wife Karen and I brought to the table. We came to the conclusion that we could do more to help veterans get into high-tech sales than any other vocation.

We also saw that there is a chronic shortage of high-tech salespeople. So a combination of that opportunity and the direct applicability of veterans to those opportunities were the driving factors behind really wanting to make a difference as veterans transition.

Q: So why has no one ever done what you and the TQ team are doing?

A: I think what you have is two basic business models that have approached veterans to help them make transitions. You have the non-profit segment, and then you have the for-profit segment. The for-profit segment fundamentally focuses on the economics of recruiting and placing. It’s very difficult in those models to make the training investments required to help people make those transitions. So these companies tend to stick to just trying to find people that are easy to place, and then find jobs that are relatively easy to convince veterans to go and take. But they haven’t set up their business with the intention of making money by actually creating value through training.

Tech Qualled Founders on Day 1 – May 2015

On the other hand, you have the non-profits. They have great intentions and are passionate about their missions. The challenge with any non-profit is that instead of pursuing revenue through a focus on a compelling value proposition, they must pursue donations and grants.  We have benefited greatly by the inherent feedback mechanism of the free market, and it has forced us to adapt quickly or perish. The feedback cycle for non-profits is too slow, and they often do not adapt to the feedback of their constituents quickly enough.

I think we are a great blend in between. We are what many people would call a “social enterprise.” We are willing to accept much lower profits than a traditional for-profit company. With the added advantage of taking some of the financial pressure off, what we’re looking for is a business model that is sustainable, as opposed to a business model that is designed to maximize profitability.

We are very clear that our first priority is our mission;  however, we are also very clear that we cannot pursue that mission without a strong financial foundation.

Q: Where do you see the high-tech industry going in the next five to ten years?

A: The great thing about the high-tech industry is that it changes all the time. Let me take a company that we are very close to in this program, Cisco Systems, and talk about their transition to give you a sense of how much surviving companies have to evolve.

Cisco was founded as a company that sold one product: a “router,” something that connects disparate locations and moves Internet traffic. It’s still a huge business for Cisco, but they were a single product company. Since then, here are some of the main transformations they had to undergo:

•  They were in a position of being threatened by something called “switches,” so they ended up getting into that business and dominating it.
•  They looked at the Internet and realized there was a great opportunity to move video and voice over the Internet, so they made investments there, and today they are the leading company in enterprise voice products (think business telephones / telephony).
•  They saw what was happening in the data center, and the amount of complexity that was associated with managing multiple switches, routers, servers, and storage units, so they applied what they knew from a networking standpoint into the data center and created a product called UCS (Unified Compute System). And that has taken the market by storm.

So if you come into a career on a high-tech sales team, you have to remain absolutely committed to staying on top of the industry trends and re-inventing yourself every 12 to 18 months. If you don’t, you get left behind.

This is an environment where you have to love this rate of change to really be successful. The companies and the people that are really good at embracing this change are the people that are going to survive and thrive going into the future.

EL SEGUNDO, Calif., July 12, 2016 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — PCM-G, Inc., a top IT solutions provider to the public sector, education and state and local agencies and wholly-owned subsidiary of PCM, Inc. (NASDAQ:PCMI) today announced a collaboration with veteran training organization, Tech Qualled, to help US veterans secure jobs in the IT industry.

With its rapid expansion and growth nationwide, PCM-G sought a way to recruit more high-caliber candidates with deep interests in technology and strong work ethics.

“Working with Tech Qualled is mutually beneficial for our organizations,” said Wayne Fullerton, Senior Vice President of Sales for PCM-G.  “We are honored and committed to help veterans transition back into the workforce. PCM-
G values the contributions our veterans have made, we realize that they bring a wealth of understanding about our customers’ mission, and we see them as future leaders within our business.”

Founder of Tech Qualled, Jim Sherriff, started the company in 2014 as a way to give veterans the skills they needed to assimilate back into the workforce in an industry that many didn’t have access to due to lack of training.

Tech Qualled is a free 10-week program for those interested in working in the Field Sales or Engineering management side of the IT industry.  Each track is specifically focused on teaching veterans concepts such as data center solutions, basic networking, and cloud computing, as well as hands-on training such as sales role-playing, running successful customer meetings and handling objections.

“Value-added technology solution providers like PCM-G bring together the largest tech companies in the industry,” said Justin Ossola, Tech Qualled Co-founder. “And in the case of PCM-G, aim to serve the Federal Government for which veterans are inherently well suited.”

Former Navy Lieutenant, Lauren Burnell, graduated from Tech Qualled’s first cohort with the opportunity to experience both the sales and engineering curriculums before finding a job as a pre-sales engineer with PCM-G.  “As veterans without prior sales or industry engineering experience, Tech Qualled provides one of the only ways to break into high tech sales,” said Burnell. “For engineering candidates like myself, you get a solid foundation of networking fundamentals, solutions, and industry trends to kick start your learning process. Not only did the program exceed my wildest expectations but it really solidified that pre-sales engineering and PCM-G is a perfect fit for me.”

According to Ossola, PCM-G is the number one employer recruiting candidates from the Tech Qualled program— helping to facilitate the transition for veterans into a challenging and lucrative career path.

For more information on Tech Qualled visit www.staging.techqualled.flywheelsites.com. To learn more about PCM-G IT Solutions and Services visit www.pcmg.com or call 800-625-5468.

Tech Qualled will be releasing several videos over the next few months in an attempt to educate transitioning veterans on the ins and outs of high tech. We encourage an open dialog to include insightful comments, professional advice for veterans and helpful tips regarding military transitions to the technology space.

If you are a veteran looking to land a lucrative high-tech sales role or are seeking a proven trajectory to high-tech leadership, contact our Recruiting Director, Meredith Davis, at meredith@staging.techqualled.flywheelsites.com.

By Dan Zehr – American-Statesman Staff

If Michael Lynn didn’t fully understand the instability that military life can inflict on a soldier’s family, he got a better sense for it in 2012.

When Lynn, then a counterespionage case officer in the U.S. Air Force, stepped off a plane in Afghanistan that July, his father and brother were there to greet him. The following day, his wife arrived for her own deployment.

“All four of us were there while mom was back in Reston with the dogs,” Lynn said. “She’s a strong lady.”

Such is life in a family dedicated to the military and the foreign service. But when Lynn’s daughter was born in January 2014, he and his wife also knew they wanted a different life for her.

“My wife and I took a good hard look at where we came from and where we were going,” he said. “We didn’t want to have her face mom and dad deploying.”

So over the next year, they started planning for life after the military. On the advice of a mentor, they saved enough money to cover a six-month transition. And by the end of last year, while starting the official transition process, Lynn linked up with a recruiting firm that placed with veterans with private-sector companies.

He went through multiple rounds of interviews, but nothing quite fit. And then he heard from Justin Ossola.

Ossola worked for Tech Qualled, a firm launched by a retired Austin tech executive to train soldiers for advanced, high-tech sales jobs. The company had just joined the host of training and recruitment firms that try to help the tens of thousands of veterans who transition from military to civilian life each month.

Most training programs focus on enlisted soldiers. But Tech Qualled offered a different approach.

It recruits officers and college-educated enlisted soldiers who, after an intense 10-week training course, can slot comfortably into technically demanding sales roles at high-tech companies. And it supplements that curriculum with a full-service support program designed to help students navigate their transition into civilian life.

Because it was so new, Lynn was skeptical at first. But he had also started to feel increasingly anxious about his pending shift out of the Air Force, which he’d joined straight out of Boston University. The breadth of support won him over.

“We knew it was a gamble, especially since we were class No. 1,” he said. “But having met the Tech Qualled team and seen the dedication and commitment they were bringing to the table, I knew even If I had to give it another few weeks they were going to see it through and put me in front of a company that wanted me on their team.”

All 11 members of the first class have landed jobs. Lynn and his family moved to Austin, where he works as an enterprise account executive with Blackberry.

‘Working for a purpose’

Jim Sherriff has no military experience, but he knows how fraught the soldier-to-civilian crossover can be. His two nephews struggled when they cycled out of the military. One eventually made it through; the other took his own life.

“My brother dealt with his grief by starting a foundation that helped veterans who were struggling with their transitions,” Sherriff said. “It had really good intentions, but it was not a scalable model.”

Having wrapped up a 35-year career in executive and sales leadership roles with Hewlett-Packard and Cisco, Sherriff dedicated himself to developing a self-sustaining organization that could help veterans make that transition.

He and his wife, Karen, developed Tech Qualled. (The name is a play off the military jargon for “qualified.”) They initially saw it as a nonprofit training program, but they made two critical changes while participating in Harvard University’s Advanced Leadership Initiative — a program for people ” transitioning from working for a living to working for a purpose,” Sheriff said.

First, they decided to launch as a for-profit company, so they could attract more funding and talent. Then they brought on Ossola and Nick Breedlove, two veterans who were working toward master’s degrees and brought extensive military experience.

And then the Sherriffs took it a step further, designing a corporate and capital structure that, over time, will shift majority ownership of the company to the veterans who work there.

Do something different

Today, Tech Qualled offers an account executive track, which readies students for external sales roles, and an engineering management track, which trains veterans for technical roles associated that support sales teams.

It’s free for the veterans who participate, Sherriff said, with revenue coming from placement fees paid by companies.

For employers like Wayne Fullerton, senior vice president for sales at PCM-G, which sells technology to the armed forces and other public-sector customers, the combination of military experience and private sector skills makes the investment well worth it.

“I think it gives me an unfair advantage over my competitors who aren’t hiring the veterans who know the mission,” Fullerton said. “I’m hiring guys who did it.”

Fullerton said he appreciated the altruistic side of hiring veterans, but he’s run the numbers and seen a financial return on the placement fees he pays Tech Qualled to hire its graduates. He hired three from the first cohort and is already talking to some of the program’s 15 current students.

But that’s not always an easy blend to create.

“The perception is that veterans are too hierarchical and structured,” Sherriff said. “They need to be able to deal with more ambiguity and flexibility, especially in a sales role.”

Tech Qualled bakes that into the program. For example, it leaves instructions in its online exercises vague or open to interpretation, pushing veterans used to the military’s structure to think more creatively. They even bring a Dallas improv comedy troupe in as an icebreaker for boot camp.

The training and support aren’t cheap — currently costing Tech Qualled in excess of $10,000 to put a student through the program, Sheriff said. But he said he expects those costs to drop as the program adds more capacity and they put processes in place to support students without the heavy oversight needed in the startup phase.

For now, Sherriff said he is more concerned about getting transitioning soldiers into the Tech Qualled program. So he, Ossola and the rest of the team are busy reaching out to soldiers like Michelle Kimbrough, one of the program’s current students.

A graduate of West Point, Kimbrough hopes to find a job near Fort Bragg, where her husband is stationed as a newly minted Green Beret. It can be harder to find jobs in specific locations, and as of last week she was preparing for some second-round interviews.

After seven years in the military, she said, the transition was going well, even though she hadn’t followed the same path her West Point classmates took. Many had gone on to graduate school. Most of the rest linked up with recruiting and job-placement agencies.

“And then there’s the rest of us,” she said, “who kind of want to do something different.”

Link to original article: http://atxne.ws/28FiAAT