This message is written by a veteran, to veterans. It’s written because I interact with hundreds of transitioning veterans every month as a recruiter. Based on those conversations, I would like to offer some perspective to help you better conceptualize your civilian career, understand your value in the marketplace, and see where you fit into the future of the commercial landscape.

I invite you to follow up with me. Let me know what resonates with you!

Here are some facts about the tech industry and the Account Executive role, along with my personal advice for how to apply them in your career transition:

Technology is a $53 billion industry, touching every other industry globally. To compete – even to survive – every company now needs to be a tech company.

• Don’t apologize for wanting to make money for the first time in your professional life. Money is how impact is measured in the commercial world.

There is a need for traits of commitment, discipline, teamwork and tenacity in the business-to-business sales role in tech.

• Don’t undersell your military experience. You bring a very uniquely challenging lifestyle, and have carried more responsibility than you likely give yourself credit for. Your character is invaluable in the commercial world.

This market is shaped by rapid innovation, dynamic change, and departure from norms.

• Don’t conform to a post-military career field without considering where that field is going in the next 10 or 20 years. Any military warfare specialty can translate into success in tech sales.

Prior to the Tech Qualled program, there was no way for veterans to access this role in this industry.

• Do research the success of our candidates thus far, and see for yourself that this career path is now well-proven. Know that you can be the next success story.

The Account Executive role inherently comes with a need to master the practical levers of business, and produce actionable results.

• Do evaluate your career goals carefully. If you aspire toward entrepreneurship or company leadership, the Account Executive role offers real-time and honest feedback on the efficacy of your business acumen. Entrepreneurship and executive leadership always require knowledge of sales.

The Account Executive role uniquely positions you face-to-face with the top tier of decision makers at client companies.

• Do consider the value of daily access to the mentalities of the highest level of business leaders in your first job out of the military.

I am here to help you think through your options and will be the first to tell you if we are not a good mutual fit. If this article or the Tech Qualled mission sparks your interest, please contact me and we can discuss whether this career path is right for you!

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Veteran Recruiting Manager at Tech Qualled, Meredith served as a US Marine Corps Logistics Officer and is the spouse, sister, and daughter of US Marines. Meredith graduated from the United States Naval Academy with a BS in International Relations where she proudly served as 18th Company Commander.

Kristina Hill will be joining the team this October! She hails from Clemson University and brings Team Tech Qualled to a strength of 10 — with 5 new hires occurring since January 2016. @TQualled is trending up!

Kristina began her career as an account executive in the media industry, helping her customers create results-driven marketing and media solutions. Shortly after she was transferred to Charlotte, NC, she moved into the non-profit world and led a team focused on marketing and fundraising for the YMCA of Greater Charlotte. Five years later she transitioned into a recruiting and human capital management in the tech industry where she quickly developed strong relationships in the IT community and helped multiple VAR’s grow their sales teams. Her positive experience working with Tech Qualled as a customer is what drove her to pursue a career working with Tech Qualled and to be a part of the strong vision, brand and presence Tech Qualled is known for. As a member of the team she will focus primarily on business development and expanding partnership opportunities within the tech industry.

Kristina is a graduate of Clemson University where she received a Bachelors of Arts in Communications and a minor in Journalism. Kristina lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband and two children and when not working, enjoys running, spending time with her family and watching her Clemson Tigers play football!

Like many transitioning veterans, there are many paths ahead that one must sort through. Should I go back to school and use the GI Bill? Should I find a job? What job do I want and how do I get there? Should I use a JMO placement firm?

I asked myself these same questions when I decided to separate from the Army this year. I’m a West Point graduate and served 9 years in the Army Corps of Engineers. After updating my LinkedIn profile to indicate my pending transition, I was contacted by Meredith Davis, the Veteran Recruiting Manager at a company called Tech Qualled. Tech Qualled is the only transitioning military training firm that specializes in the IT industry placing veterans in outside sales opportunities they would not be qualified for otherwise. The sales training is why I chose the program. The training makes the difference, and the finale of that training is a 2-day exercise called Victory Forge.

Victory Forge is the culmination of nine weeks of immersive IT industry and sales training. The training consists of seven weeks of virtual, self-paced training followed by a 2-week sales boot camp in Fort Worth, Texas led by Tech Qualled’s CEO and former Cisco executive, Jim Sherriff. When you arrive in Fort Worth with your cohort of about 15-20 other transitioning veterans, you already have a solid understanding of technical sales and the various pillars of the IT industry. Your cohort is a diverse and talented group pulled from all branches of military service. They are motivated, talented and built for sales. The first week of live training is extensive role-playing, sales calls, sales presentation planning, public speaking training and a crucial 30-60-90 day sales plan workshop. They even brought in the Dallas Improv Troupe on day 1 to break the ice and help us get comfortable. The last week is the culmination of the previous training and builds upon your solid foundation.

Victory Forge is a 2-day capstone exercise that places each candidate in a rapidly simulated, industry-vetted, sales scenario that takes you and your team through the entire sales cycle. Tech Qualled brings in sales leaders and executives for the sales calls and you role-play through the scenario. The role-players that Tech Qualled invites to the training give you immediate feedback from their perspective as real-world technology sales leaders. You work with your team to qualify and investigate your prospect, and then prepare to make a final proposal. Some teams close the deal – others walk away empty handed. As any veteran who loves to compete and win, the team and I put a lot of pressure on each other. The scenario was vague and incomplete.  Does this sound familiar? It’s very similar to situations many veterans faced every day while deployed or solving complex issues of national security.

You might be wondering where these industry experts come from. Tech Qualled leverages its deep network to bring in sales leaders and executives to participate in Victory Forge. As a byproduct, this opportunity gives the sales leaders greater exposure to the Tech Qualled curriculum and the caliber of the candidates. Conversely, it gives candidates an opportunity to learn from the best and expand their network of mentors. As a side note, many of these interactions led to job offers, so we were all trying to impress and close the deal.

Personally, this experience was invaluable in developing my understanding of the corporate procurement process. Within a week of graduation, I received two job offers in Colorado and ended up taking a Senior Sales Executive position at Encompass Technologies where I sell ERP software. I’ve been on the job for three weeks and expect to close my first million dollar deal next week. So ask yourself, are you ready to close million dollar deals within your first month of employment in the IT industry? I know before Tech Qualled I wasn’t, however, Victory Forge prepared me with the knowledge and confidence to hunt, kill, and feast.

This month, Tech Qualled surpassed the One Million Dollar mark in total investment to assist veterans transitioning from the military into high tech sales. The bulk of that investment has been in training and veteran placement services at absolutely no cost to the veterans.

We are extremely proud of our alumni of 50 graduates and the impacts that they are having with their employers. We want to thank the veterans that have put their faith in our program and the employers who have seen the incredible potential in these veterans. I would also like to thank the dedicated employees of Tech Qualled who demonstrate their commitment to helping veterans every day.

Jim Sherriff | CEO and Co-Founder

“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.