Unemployed for the first time in over twenty-three years.
In 1986 when I left the Marine Corps after nine years, I returned to Seattle with great excitement. I had a great run in the Marine Corp, promoted rapidly; I had excelled as an electronics instructor. With over 5000 hours of training time, I was rated as a Master instructor and had developed over a hundred hours of content on computer science, digital logic, and fundamental programming.
I thought I had the world by the tail, and then I came to Seattle – the home of a small but growing company called Microsoft. I soon found that companies were not knocking down my door to hire me. I struggled for months looking for a job and went through all of the traditional feelings and emotions of a man who could not support his family. Somehow, even the first job I got as a slurpy machine technician for Southland Corporation did not help my ego. Nevertheless, I made the best of it and began teaching electronics to my fellow technicians.
I kept looking for opportunities and working at Southland until I landed a job at Boeing Computer Systems. Boeing turned out to be a great opportunity; I ended up supporting a Computer Aided Drafting group responsible for printed wiring board design. Over the first few years, I learned networking, programming, and systems support at night while I went to college during the day. I must admit it was cool writing my college papers on mainframes.
After finishing college I moved to another group supporting thin client installations, I designed and implemented a terminal server solution supporting over a 1000 users. Remember this was when a x286 PC was a novelty. I spent over $2,000 to buy an IBM clone with two 5.25 floppies, an amber monitor and no hard drive and thought I was hot stuff. I was in love with computers; this was my third after wearing out a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 3 and a Radio Shack Color Computer (Coco). I was promoted to a network support manager managing over a dozen support technicians.
After a five year hiatus as a Pastor leading a church to double in size and initiating a major building program I returned to technology and computers with a job at Catapult Software Training ( an IBM holding) where I taught all of Microsoft’s office products, Lotus Notes and various other software packages as a lead instructor. Catapult needed someone to take a Microsoft exam to keep their certification as a Microsoft partner so I volunteered and passed the Windows 95 exam. I really enjoyed prepping for the exam and decided to pursue my MCSE; I had done a lot of the work so figured I might as well get the certs. I earned MCSE certifications on Windows 4.0, 2000, 2003 and my MCSD on Visual Basic 6.0 after I moved to Netdesk Corporation where I taught classes on all of these and more.
My training days began to diminish as I was promoted to Director of Operations and eventually to Vice President running training operations, multiple sites and classrooms, two managers and from six to eighteen instructors. Involved in training design, learning consulting and sales I only got a few chances to teach most of the technologies. However, I did dig my fingers in a new product called SharePoint. While I was not impressed with SharePoint 2001, I loved SharePoint 2003 and began to see the opportunity right away. I built portals for classes and instructors, portals for our intranet, training portal for customers and a major portal to support communities of students, online learning, interactive learning environments, personalization and targeting.
I left Netdesk to launch a national training business for Hitachi Consulting where I continued to build portals now on MOSS as well as writing a couple of MOSS courses for public and private training. The training went well and we grew and expanded until the bottom fell out the beginning of this year. Training has always been a difficult business to run profitably since the dot com bubble burst and it proved too much of an investment for Hitachi in the midst of a recession. I moved to consulting services and worked several MOSS projects until I was reorganized out of a job.
Unemployment is not much fun but truth be told I was underemployed since I left Training Services and I really wasn’t very happy so I am excited about what is next!