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Think the tech world is all about lucrative salaries and overnight success? Take a step back and join us in a candid conversation with Markeisha , cybersecurity professional and founder of UDeserveIT, as we debunk these false narratives and provide a reality check. In this intriguing chat, Markeisha shares her unconventional journey from healthcare dreams to a theology passion, and how it ultimately led her to the tech space.
We share our own experiences developing pages for government directorates, highlighting the aptitude and attitude needed to succeed in the tech industry. Markeisha provides some honest insights on the pandemic's impact on tech salaries and the importance of acquiring elite skills for drawing higher salaries. Along the way, she shares some invaluable tips on job searching, tailoring resumes, and preparing for interviews in the tech industry. We also delve into the value of cybersecurity certifications and why continuous learning and specialized skills are crucial for success in the tech world.
As we wrap up, Markeisha introduces the comprehensive services offered by her career services firm, UDeserveIT. She emphasizes the importance of possessing a well-rounded skill set and a strong personality to stand out in the competitive job market. This conversation is a must-listen for anyone seeking a realistic and insightful perspective on the tech industry and the paths to success within it. Tune in, absorb the wisdom, and remember, you deserve it.
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They're going on Twitter, especially black tech Twitter, and they're seeing these people in all this luxury stuff, right, and they're saying, oh, I make $500,000 a year. You're not making $500,000 a year from one job, like, let's be honest, unless you are contracting and I mean C2C, corp to corp or you have government contracts or you're an entrepreneur you're not making that type of money from a W2 like that. Very seldom you're seeing stuff like that. So, as people are consistently coming online and saying those things, they're painting a false narrative for these newer people, and these newer people are feeling like they're so far behind, they have to catch up and they're getting desperate. They're now spending money in the wrong places. They're looking at the wrong resources.
Speaker 2:There are only a certain amount of people that have the experience to make salaries in the twos or even closer to threes, and doing it in a while.
Speaker 1:So A while you hear that.
Speaker 2:You're interested in starting your career in the cloud? Well, if that's you, then I got some for you. Level Up and Tech is a comprehensive 24 week program guaranteed to help you land a high paying role in the cloud. Some of the skills that they teach you in Level Up and Tech are server config and troubleshooting, aws infrastructure as code, ci, cd scripting, containerization and more. Level Up and Tech has helped over 800 people start their career in the cloud. So if you're interested in the program, click the link in my bio, click on the tech resources and click on start your cloud career. That's like one of my favorite Chinese costumes.
Speaker 3:I got my master's.
Speaker 2:This is my song, we're here Bitch.
Speaker 1:No, that song was lit at the concert.
Speaker 2:I wanted to go. It was nice. I'm probably trying to go to one of those concerts. You know what? I really haven't listened much to the latest album.
Speaker 1:That's like one of my favorite albums.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna have to listen through it sounding good. I just got to go back and listen to it. It'll be so much easier. I was just a little, since I was in traffic, I said, no, I'm gonna put that Pink Friday 2 on.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, just drop, I'm a.
Speaker 4:Nicki fan. I don't know how I'm gonna get my mood up, so I'm gonna go to Old Nicki, one of my favorite Old Nicki songs right up here.
Speaker 2:I like this song, I like this song. I like this song, I like this song. I like this song, I like this song, I like this song. I like this song. I like this song, I like this song, I like this song. I always tell everybody yeah, I used to be a musician, so I listened to samples and stuff playing and I want to say the soap opera, general hospital, whatever it is. There's a part in there where they play oh yeah, that's how it is. Actually it's fire, run it fast. Travis puts out crazy.
Speaker 1:This is where he used to be my jam right here. Oh yeah, Everybody's jam actually.
Speaker 2:Because the freaking Don't Forget About Me sample really makes it like a lot. I like how he works on here, though.
Speaker 1:I like it too, and I think it was like a cute song to sing when you were younger I mean still now, though. I mean, but when it first came out.
Speaker 2:Do you like got like a big wig and you'd be like doing all the stuff that Nikki's doing.
Speaker 1:No, but what's crazy is I do get a lot of people that tell me that I resemble Nikki and I'm like, hold up, she resembles me because Nikki had some work done on her face.
Speaker 5:I'm gonna say I'm like, what am I on about?
Speaker 2:I mean she's still just older than us. She is.
Speaker 1:She is, but with like her nose job and stuff like that. Technically she resembles me. So between Nikki and Cardi I always say Nikki makes it, but that's also for me is because Wayne has great influence on her right.
Speaker 2:And so even listening to this stuff, right here, I said I know the new girl's been business.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and I mean Cardi's good too right. Like her, recent features have been great. She is good at her delivery and I think she takes direction very, very well. But I also feel like Nikki has that great flow and the way she's able to interchange words the same way as Wayne.
Speaker 2:Well, it's also interesting that Nikki's the only woman rapper that can give on tracks with me and actually have a beautiful verse.
Speaker 1:Yeah, she can dominate it, I agree.
Speaker 2:I agree, I mean, after this I think I'm gonna be ready Money and nothing.
Speaker 5:This came out of college.
Speaker 2:I didn't used to like it.
Speaker 1:Especially maybe the beginning part. Right, it could sound like some fairy tale.
Speaker 5:We can't.
Speaker 1:I think I recently heard like a freestyle he put out. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, can you be anywhere in the US, or how does it work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great question. You can be anywhere in the US. It is 100% virtual.
Speaker 2:Got it, got it. Welcome back to the Tiktok Top Podcast. Well, I'm your host. Hd. This is episode 111. And we have a great guest for you guys today. Her name is Marquesha. She's in cybersecurity. She also has a coaching server. I don't even want to just consider this coaching. She does a lot of different things with her company. So we're going to say she has a company, you deserve IT and she's kind of rock with us today. But before we get more into the episode, if you're watching this on YouTube, you know what to do. Hit the thumbs up button, subscribe. Hit the bell icon to be notified when I'm dropping out videos. Listen to our Apple podcast, spotify, any other streaming service. Please follow the podcast. Download it so you can tune into this when you try to work, because that's what we make this good content for. But I'm glad she's came all the way from DC to rock with us today, so the first guest to just pull up on us from far away. So I really do appreciate that we had a little bit of traffic influx this morning down here in Dallas. I was making a joke. Somebody said I do the Boston Marathon today. Real deal, y'all. I'm driving all the way around. Gps is so stupid it doesn't realize. Hey, they got an event going on.
Speaker 1:We're using Waze. No, oh, you're using Google Maps.
Speaker 2:No, I was using Apple.
Speaker 1:Oh, ok, yeah.
Speaker 2:But I think all of them would have still not known, because they only kind of recognize if it's an accident or something Like because you're in a highway, so it was an accident, so on. So we were out here. So I was like bro, it was just killing me. The crazy thing was the way I came. I was going that way earlier but got off on the side I think I could do that but then no, streets were closed. I was like look back around again again and then come all the way down just to get off right there.
Speaker 1:I was like this is the worst.
Speaker 2:I was like I'm definitely not a Dallas person.
Speaker 1:But you're definitely not a Dallas person. I ain't born here. Listen. So yesterday I actually was sitting in a lot of traffic With the Uber driver. It took an hour just to get to my hotel and my hotel's downtown. Shouldn't have taken that long. But back to back accidents.
Speaker 2:People can't drive down here I heard people cannot drive in Dallas All right, Listen, we're going to have fun with this If you was to guess the race of people who had an accident. So you think they is.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh the race. Is it more Hispanics?
Speaker 2:Yeah, but they can drive though.
Speaker 1:They can. So usually I'd say Asians. Is it Asians that are in?
Speaker 2:Kind of, but we talked about them as them being recruiters, which is, steve, like if you can know, if you're an. ITU get. What are we going to say? That's what we're going to say. They are recruiters and they can't drive. They don't know all type of stuff. I'd be like bro, or like people like real deal, people just don't know how to like. Shout out to Pat Like I would never understand why people don't know how to drive straight. Because for the life of me, I don't understand how you have a wreck on the highway, because you're literally driving straight.
Speaker 1:You're just driving straight. It must be when they're switching lanes.
Speaker 2:It's switching lanes. It's them. I'm going to tell you what I'll say is getting people in trouble. They're relying too much on the technology instead of them.
Speaker 1:The blind spot.
Speaker 2:The sensors are off sometimes.
Speaker 1:And they can't they can't pick up.
Speaker 2:They're not as fast as a human Like I. Like you, trust your instincts. You've been driving for a while, because sometimes you'll drive and they'll be like do, do, do, but nothing's by you, or come right upon you, or it's like you're departing the lane but you're in lane Like it's stupid. So just don't rely on that.
Speaker 1:That's very true.
Speaker 2:So outside of the traffic, how you been enjoying Dallas.
Speaker 1:Great, I was at the mall yesterday, okay.
Speaker 2:Which is at the Newport Mall.
Speaker 1:Yes, I was over there and it is nice. I will say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, this funny thing is like I tell people all the time people talk about like Houston, austin and Dallas, I was like, well, if you want the best of both worlds, you want to have like stuff to do, and then you want something that's actually like being a little city down here in Texas. Like Move to Dallas, especially for us. I don't like Austin is cool, they got some tech jobs down there that they'll turn to school. It's a little bit more liberal, a bag for me. I feel like it's for more of a younger crowd.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like.
Speaker 2:I feel like Dallas is the best of both worlds because even like Houston's like good, like food party and you're gonna have fun a lot about Houston.
Speaker 1:I mean I have to go to Houston next.
Speaker 2:Houston. You don't have a good time, especially with the strippers liking you have good time this trip.
Speaker 1:I actually just put on Twitter.
Speaker 2:I was like yo, it's trip club food good cuz I'm not a strip club type of guy.
Speaker 1:The strip club food can't be good.
Speaker 2:I'm not like, I'm not really like a strip club.
Speaker 1:So I tend to not order strip club food when I go, because a lot of the times it's like finger foods, like wings and stuff, and I'm not eating wings at a strip club, especially when I'm about to be touching strippers.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I want to get. Well, some people, like the athletes, are this is something like the POTS or the entertainers they'll go there, like certain strip Clubs are, like certain food that, like everybody knows like really good food tank is always talking about some impossible burger at some strip club I forgot where it is, but I don't know and then be marshal, talk about Whatever club like going there, like steak or something I don't know. But I want to try like. The only club I've been out to here is Um, it wasn't ecstasy. I think it's closed down now. It was smaller. It's a smaller version of what they had. They had in Houston. I think that was closed down too. It's a freaking. I forgot. I'll come. It'll come to me.
Speaker 1:No, I was telling somebody on Twitter that I needed to go to a strip club, but I don't think I'm gonna be able to make it. But I'll come back. I'll come back to Dallas so I can check it out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we might have the event, but let's introduce you to the viewers, the listeners. Who is Marquisha?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my name is Marquisha Snaith, born and raised in the Alexandria Virginia area, currently living in Maryland, which I actually prefer living in Maryland over living in northern Virginia again, just because the prices are very, you know, high up there, but also traffic it's, it's hectic. I mean, ever since I was born there's just been construction all the time it's. It's never changed. But yeah, living in Maryland, I am the CEO and owner of you deserve IT consulting, but I do also have a lot of other businesses and I have things coming down the pipeline, especially at the start of next year, that I'm really excited to share with people In the near future. So thank you for having me on here.
Speaker 2:Thank you for coming.
Speaker 1:We've been trying to do this for a while, that's funny we have, and we weren't even going to do it in person.
Speaker 2:Right right, I was just I've been, because you know it's funny. At first I hesitated on ex people's like they want to come out here, but then I thought about it. I was like it's not Miami, is not LA, but people be wanting to come to Dallas. Absolutely so when I say I say when you coming down they're like shoes, just let me know. So I Appreciate you for coming down. I've kind of been off the pie for like a couple of weeks that this coming week they may or may not get some because I'm busy, but if stuff go through like it's supposed to, it'll be worth it. Absolutely but I want to get briefly into like your, your background, about High school, or a little bit of high school, but more so like college kind of. Did you know that you want to be in tech? Did you Want to do something else? Like a lot of people, a lot people didn't know they want to be like in tech or IT or cyber security or whatever. A lot Of people thought there's one do something else. I thought it's gonna be architect. Well, no, before I thought it's gonna be architect, I thought it's gonna be a professional wrestler. Yeah, that's gonna be okay.
Speaker 1:I mean, those are good career paths though, right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but think about it. I didn't really well back then. They had some of the shows on TV about being a wrestler tough enough. But then I was gonna say, okay, cool, I gotta go to wrestling school for all school. Do awesome that. Then Now I'm, so I tend to be a good wrestler. I promise I'll get on steroids. The promos is good. I was raised up on stone cold in the rock and triple h, sean Michaels, all the, all the greats. That's what I watched like every day, so I think it's been fun. Like a couple part of me still wants to like oh no, I would like to cut some promo. Actually be want to do like the back and forth a little bit With podcast and content with the other podcasters, sometimes just to give them a little COE. But about you like what? What were you interested in kind of liking your, your younger, adolescent years?
Speaker 1:sure. So I think it's always a great conversation starter, especially when I'm in interviews. So my bachelor's degree is in theology and theology is the study of God. I didn't originally start off like that. My focus was really on health care growing up, like at the age of 12. I wanted to Move into like forensics and then ended up really be interest. I really ended up being interested in moving into doing surgery, so like being a neurosurgeon or a general surgeon in the ER. That was of interest to me because At that time my mom had just found out that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and In my mind I really want it to help her right, and so Taking a path like that you know, moving into medicine would have allowed me to be able to do so. So the health care Track was where I was headed and so when I first started off in college, I started off at Old Dominion University. I was there for two years, that's in Norfolk, virginia. I was on the biology track and things were going really, really, really great there. But I decided that I need to be home because my mom got really sick. She got much, much, much more sick, and so I transferred over to Loyola University, maryland, which is in Baltimore, maryland. It was the first Loyola actually Jesuit school and that's really what led me over to Loyola was the Jesuit education. It is a unique, I guess you could say, perspective that the Jesuits have. They really focus on the whole individual and that was important to me. So when I started off at Loyola things were a little different for me. The school environment, you know, a lot of the students came from up north and they were very clicky already because they had all been going to private schools for High school and it was different. You know, it wasn't very diverse. But fortunately I ended up Becoming best friends with my college roommate at Loyola, so it was great. And so I was taking biology and I just honestly could not pass chemistry. I mean, I had taken chemistry maybe like three different times and at that time my uncle was just starting his college and he was pursuing medicine, which now he's actually a doctor. So I'm super proud of him. He stuck through it. He's a smart one. But um Tech, chemistry was not my thing and so, no matter I took, I went to, I had tutors, I went to summer school. I was not able to pass chemistry and I had spoken to my professor and he he had asked, you know is, is this truly what you want to do or have you considered something else? And Because, starting at Loyola, you had to take the core courses and, it being a Jesuit school, theology were some of the core courses I had to take and so I started going down that path of theology and you know, loyola offered very unique courses like Demonology and Hell versus heaven, and you can imagine that stuff is interesting, right. So I ended up going that track and switching over, and I'm happy I did, because you know, a degree in humanities is, in my opinion, a very strong degree. It really helps you to you know, know how to like, read, right, but really those analytical skills which you use in tech now, right, and so I'm just dabbling kind of in the jobs that I had between Healthcare and doing a lot of being able to do like a lot of tech stuff there at those companies. I ended up kind of officially making my way into tech and fast forward. I was Kind of moving into cybersecurity I had done on SharePoint development stuff, so I actually had no idea what I was doing with SharePoint development, but I had somehow gotten into a contract and One of the departments I had to move into they needed somebody to develop the SharePoint and it was like I had three days to learn off somebody and I learned it and then I started doing it for all of the Directives and that's kind of how I landed on SharePoint development and from there I kind of just kept maneuvering my way and you know now I'm doing more security architect work cool, we'll get into that.
Speaker 2:I had a couple of jokes about theology.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:So did you ever think about going to be a missionary?
Speaker 1:Yes, I can see you, I did actually.
Speaker 2:Because, because you always see like and I think that's the thing I think theology is interesting, I do listen to people their perspectives on different things. Or I studied here, studied here, and unfortunately, the interesting thing about you know religion is that I Think two things could be the same. But then you got to think about okay, who exactly wrote all this that we're learning where to come from and then what they believe, what they believe, what they believe. That's like why people just argue, people start fighting. That's why wars and stuff happened most of time a lot of like in the past or like over religions.
Speaker 1:Oh, absolutely, I think it's.
Speaker 2:I think it's a pretty interesting and then you just have I don't know I think I think it's just cool. I think then, when you do like going to theology, you'll see how many people Never read their Bible at all.
Speaker 1:That is true A lot of my classmates, you know. They already had a Catholic background because they were going to the private schools, and so it was different to hear their perspective. I mean, I had always, you know, been Christian, but it was really important for me to understand what Christianity was. Why was I Christian? Because most of the times, we are what our parents are right, and so if our parents are going to church, we're going to church. But do we really understand why we're going to church? And I think it's important for people to explore that, and I had an opportunity to do so yeah, and this is not a religious podcast at all, but from my make it.
Speaker 2:From my experience, what tends to happen in in those ways is that a lot of times parents are just dragging the kids to church but they're not explaining anything to them. Then their church probably is not really even teaching the kids at a young age certain things. They're probably just there in the back playing until and coloring, yeah, until they get to a certain age, and then the family is probably not doing any type of study on their own or teaching the kids or anything, and I'm like. So I had to benefit. Like I'm not even a freaking church girl now, I actually have my own Kind of thoughts a little bit as far as you know organized religion or all these other things. However, I did have the benefit of being a part of my church family, where, of course, I was a drummer once I got older, but we were always in different plays. A lot of these different things, which things that still stick with me now, things that I know I'm still able to. I wanted to like debate people when they bring things up, because I know what scripture, I know it's not, and so it's definitely. It's definitely, it's definitely pretty cool.
Speaker 1:I can get fun.
Speaker 2:I mean that that's the whole. The whole premise about everything is like Okay, you'll have like, the biggest thing is like okay, well, old Testament was wrote mostly in Hebrew and now you got Greek translation and now it's different. And well, it's different and old, this and that. But you know, god got a verse that he changes not. But so if he changes not, then he still don't like these people and that people like. That's why a lot. I think a lot of people feel like it's a book of contradictions, so that's why people like this and this other way. It's just a lot when you kind of let's break it down, and that's why people just like man, I don't know like it is what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and a lot of people they don't break it down right. So you know, just kind of going back to what you said, where you know a lot of parents just Drag their kids along to church and whatnot and then kind of what the church is teaching which maybe they're not really spending time teaching how they should or what they should, it's important to kind of do that on your own and to really understand the Bible and break it down. Like when I was in my studies, we would I mean, we would spend an entire semester going over one book in the Bible and it was a lot. I mean I had to write like 30 page papers on Genesis and I mean that's overwhelming.
Speaker 2:But that's. I'm chilling with all this stuff is interesting but it's kind of hard. The reason why I probably can do theology because if they want to really get to the Neat, eGriti I Really be would break down Genesis and I'm like. First of all, None of y'all in here like them people now I look similar to them but y'all don't. That's something I would. I would tell them because it just makes sense. If you talk about the landscape we're supposed to take place and all these different things, we know how genetics work. It definitely wasn't them back there, right? But I'll say this and then we'll get to the next question, talking about going to church and religion similar to college. It's kind of what you get, it you get. What you put into is like I'll say my younger brother hey, you're in school now, but you're gonna have to do learning outside of school, yeah, in order to get to where you want to get to, if you want to get an internship out of. So the stuff they're teaching you is like fine, you're really going to connect with people and network, but you're gonna put in your own work outside of school in order to be successful.
Speaker 1:You really have to apply yourself, and I think that goes hand-in-hand with the IT field right. You always have to consistently be learning. You can't just sit back and get into a job and kind of just feel like you can coast. It doesn't work that way. You have to apply yourself. You have to always level up your skills and I mean I know we'll get into that a lot more, but that's definitely something important to know definitely now.
Speaker 2:Earlier you talked about how you just got your break Doing SharePoint development, but some malicious may not even know what SharePoint is. So in layman's terms, could you explain what SharePoint is?
Speaker 1:Sure, let me see the best way I can break this down. And then, to be clear, it wasn't just technically getting a break doing SharePoint development. I had always been doing IT work. So there was a point in time when I was an office manager and I still had to like manage all of the IT, like the onboarding of all of like the Laptops, and I had to configure them and the phone system and stuff like that. So I was able to kind of get you know a lot more experience that way. But kind of going back to SharePoint and what it is, so SharePoint is a site that is through Microsoft, so Microsoft SharePoint and it's pretty much let me see the best way to say this is SharePoint is a site that can be used for. It's almost like Confluence in a sense, I guess you could say so you can, you can make websites on it, but then you can also store a lot of your documentation and your files and whatnot. So at that time I had to develop a lot of the Directorates pages. So, working for the government, there was multiple Directorates and there was like nine under where I was, the agency I was working for, and I had to develop each page. So people basically had a landing page to go to. So if they needed to and this was actually External, so if they needed to read more up on the directorate, they would go to that page and then click in, read more about the organization. If they needed to upload information, that'd be what they'd be able to upload it. If they needed to be able to kind of Pull some information down, they were able to do that. So it was very overwhelming in a sense that I had no clue what I was doing and I was always having to make it work for my clients because I was a contractor. But I was able, I mean over time, to like navigate and kind of work between the old SharePoint and the new SharePoint development.
Speaker 2:That's nice. Yeah, I would say it's close to like a simpler time, probably to get on the understands like an internal directory Maybe yeah, yeah, you could say that because normally if you log on to like your home screen, it's gonna go to your internal directory telling you what's going on in your company, what's happening and how to go to these different things. If you need to search for something, hey, how do I submit for time Off or all that type of stuff?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, definitely. It could be very, again, again, very informative. So it can be like internal, which they use it internally but they also use it externally as well.
Speaker 2:So your story reminds me of a post that my god sent me on LinkedIn what was like last night? And they kind of reminds me, I think, of why. When it comes to tech, twitter and everything else, well, sometimes there is a disconnect between people who've been in five, ten, fifteen years and newer people trying to get in. When we were getting in, there was none of the content that's out now. We just knew people did it and we wanted to, so it was different and we knew that it was rare for us to see somebody Not start from the bottom and just go straight to the top right. And a lot of people now want to skip all that and go straight to the top. So I'm gonna read this post and then we'll kind of talk about what it said. He said I Start out working in it. I started on the help desk. I was also going to school in the evenings for Microsoft Systems Engineering. Within nine months I passed the seven search to achieve the MC se and windows NT 4.0. This is 25 plus years ago. Also, cook that a bar. After my computer classes I had to pay the bills. Once I got my MCSE I got hired as a consultant. They sent me out to customers to set up, configure, troubleshoot etc. There's server issues. I was dropped into situations that I had no idea about. I had to figure it out on the fly at the read. Microsoft manual, cisco manuals we didn't have the Google. I was sent out to install new Cisco routers. I had zero spins with Cisco. So I bought a lot of Cisco manuals and I figured it out. I got them up and running. I feel as if today we are giving the folks jobs without truly putting their feet to the fire. I can certainly train someone, but if they have to have figure it out, that is a big plus. That is a skill that is hard to define. We must test our applicants for aptitude. Attitude is why I could eventually figure it out. Attitude is what we need to look for in candidates. Look for evidence that they took a technical issue and figured it out. Look for evidence that they faced with a potential security issue and dissected it. All those who say you can break, bring on entry folks into cyber are missing this point. We're responsible for some very serious issues. We are responsible for preventing a risk that could cost the organization million of dollars. We can't just hire someone to give them a break. We need to hire those who have demonstrated that passion, who can be cool under pressure. It's that internet ready to do that? Do they have the experience to handle the pressure under the fire? Fine folks who have lived that and who have that amazing aptitude I Think that's a lot to what I said can break down.
Speaker 1:It is.
Speaker 2:I think he did get his break and he didn't know anything and he figured it out. So that's good. But I do also agree with him. Like I said, people want to break in now but we don't know how to test their aptitude because a lot of times people just did a lot of stuff Online. They've never just worked in an actual setting and figured anything out like so many people right on help desk or knock Whatever into the world you want to do. But One thing you can say in that interview is like, hey, this new thing happened and I figured it out. I remember, like it's yesterday of I was working for a TSA help desk. This is an early on in my career. At first we just used to service all the TSA screeners, people that were going to airport, so all those important people that said the airports. We used to support them. Mm-hmm and I always wonder say these are people that's trying to keep us safe. But, needless to say, after that we started supporting the federal air marshals. So for people don't know who fams are there, the people that are riding the plane with you, but they're in plain clothes with their officers to make sure nothing happens when you're on the plane. And it's imperative. Back then, these guys this how long I've been in the game back then they were using blackberries.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:And we was using I think it was called biz blackberry enterprise. Well, we had no documentation on them. They just said they put the switches, that, hey, y'all covering them. So we're on the phone trying to figure out how we don't even know what they're trying to do looks like. And so these are where you get those skills that were. When it comes to like now, if I want to work on a project or product, I know different questions to ask, because I've been through, like, trying to solve Solutions. Because what I'm trying to help him with is critical he needs his phone for internet. We need to figure it out. So this involves me, hey, looping, calling my manager on the weekend and say, listen, I don't know what they looking, looking at, let's figure out these questions so we can ask them and figure these things out. I was able to help make documentation for that, but that's a situation where, hey, I have to think about it. You have no idea what you're looking at and you want to help them out and they're getting frustrated. You get frustrated like, listen, they just told us to help y'all. We don't even know how to help you guys. Yeah, no documentation, which was really bad on their part because it could have went bad, but our team figured it out. There are people You've been doing this, I've been doing this for a while. I talked to these people in these different consultations. Some of them I know right away that they've been doing a lot of good things and they can figure something out and they'll be good at a company. My affect shout out to one of my clients. He started his role like either last week, this week he could. He got thrown straight into the fire he met. He thought he messed up something up, but he didn't. But it was on the company because they didn't have documentation. Right now they tell him how to do it the right way. And he was just showing me the screenshots and afterwards the guys like, yeah, we just will walk through it or whatever. But Now in today's time, they will try to make somebody feel bad. My client went from 50k to 70 ak. For anybody else that's a good come up, Right, If you would say that on Twitter, somebody gonna try to say how you broke 70 something K. Well, I was like we know the median earnings in a country is probably like 40,000, 50,000, maybe in a household with two people working, maybe 80.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And so somebody would try to like down somebody like that, because they do think everybody is in a. Was that you the other day? Matter of fact, I bookmarked some of your tweets. Oh gosh, I bookmarked some of your tweets so we can talk about it.
Speaker 1:I say some crazy things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you do.
Speaker 1:I think the biggest thing here, too, is the pandemic has changed a lot of things, right? So I feel, as you talk about kind of how we made our way into tech and we kind of did it like in a traditional type of way, and now, since the pandemic, everybody pretty much went remote. During that time, there was no other option there and things had to keep moving, and so people were able to land multiple roles and work those multiple roles which, by the way, that is a blessing. That is not something that everybody in every single industry is able to do, and I think that sometimes people forget that and they kind of don't remember where they started, and so, as they're sitting there saying, wow, 75,000 isn't a lot and you need to be making over 200,000, that's not everybody. A lot of people are making that money because they're working more than one job, and I think people forget that and they paint this false narrative and picture for other people on let's use Twitter as an example and now everybody's feeling like, oh my God, I need to do all this stuff to reach that point, but again, you don't know what these people are really doing behind closed doors. Like you and I, we've been introduced to other people. We kind of we really know what people are doing. We may not say it, but we know. Whereas a newer person is coming on, they're going on Twitter, especially Black Tech Twitter, and they're seeing these people in all this luxury stuff, right, and they're saying oh, I make $500,000 a year. You're not making $500,000 a year from one job Like, let's be honest, unless you are contracting and I mean C2C, corp2corp, or you have government contracts or you're an entrepreneur you're not making that type of money from a W2 like that. It's very seldom you're seeing stuff like that. So, as people are consistently coming online and saying those things, they're painting a false narrative for these newer people, and these newer people are feeling like they're so far behind. They have to catch up and they're getting desperate. They're now spending money in the wrong places. They're looking at the wrong resources.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree. There are only a certain amount of people that have the experience to make salaries in the twos or even closer to threes, and I know some of them and they've been doing it a while. A while you hear that it's not like two years, yeah, and then if they haven't been doing that long which I know some people haven't been doing it as long like they probably have less than five years to experience their skills or elite. So I always tell people if you do want to leap pay, you need elite skills.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Like she said, 2020, 2021, they were over hiring. That's why a lot of these people got laid off, and so people were like, oh, what's going on with tech? Uh-huh, no, they just over hired A lot of companies. I've did an episode without some of my medals over hiring. They just hired a lot of people because they didn't want them to go work for the other fan companies, exactly so people were there just not doing anything. That's why you got the influx of the day and like, oh, today I just got my coffee, I got a spa.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the day in life.
Speaker 2:Got my feet done and all that. That's why people want to do it. Oh cool, she getting paid 200,000 and just doing that. That's why. That's why, even if I start making like a lot of money, it probably would never be luxury content, cause, for one, I'm just like a simple guy, family man with kids and stuff. But two, I want people to look at what I'm talking about content-wise and what I'm putting out there so they can look towards that, versus trying to attain stuff that I can attain because of my likeness, because of what I put in and my own personal thing. So a lot of us now who have personalities or we have a presence on social media, we get offered different things that you guys can't get. So I can, like I make content now, so I get brands reaching out to me to want to do segments on my channel or affiliate deals where I can just promote a product and get paid some money every month. That you know that's I mean, hey, it is what it is, but I put in the work to get there.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So, like you said, there are people that do like different things. That's done. And then a lot of those people are forthcoming with that information and say, hey, I make all this from like my job. And now, when it comes to brand deals, hey, I'm making you know 50,000, 40,000 a month from brand deals.
Speaker 1:So those people are actually being honest with each other and you have to respect those people. It's called transparency and it's. It's always a lovely thing when people are transparent and I understand maybe not being able to put everything out there, but you really, if you want to follow people you know, follow genuine people you need to be able to understand if people are being honest or if they're being fake or like withholding information.
Speaker 2:Definitely definitely. And then one of your tweets I brought up was oh gosh, that's not bad. It was, this was. It was like last year. It was like if you make a hundred K, you're in the top 3% of earners. I don't know if it's top three.
Speaker 1:That was actually from a survey.
Speaker 2:Oh, really it was. Now. But the reason why I said that's because we know everybody's not the top 3%. That is very true. I come from a city where probably the median income might be 20 or $30,000.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the median for where I'm living currently is maybe, I think for an individual is about 50,000 or 60,000, not mistaken, and then combined about 95,000.
Speaker 2:But I think the real issue is the fact that inflation has gotten out of control.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:So you have no choice but to do what you have to do to survive.
Speaker 1:Exactly, and if that means doubling up. Tripling up, I mean going on your hustle, getting multiple side jobs. Like I get it. You have to do what you have to do to be able to put food on the table.
Speaker 2:Exactly, they did a. It was this TikTok I saw in the guys a guy I follow. He always breaks down boomers theories about oh, they're lazy or they're not, they don't want to buy a house or they want to stay a mom. He's like no, a lot of these people can't afford to move out. They did a. So Home Alone if people have never seen Home Alone Kevin went to the store and used $20 to buy like larger detergent, some crackers, some other crappy bought. So they did the same thing for they showed if people went to the store in 2022, that same stuff would be like $44. Then they say the few that went in 2023, the same stuff a year ago that was $44 was like 70 something.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:And so this is the same room I'm going to tell y'all to always look out for yourself. Your jobs every year are not giving most people raises that are beating inflation.
Speaker 1:They're not.
Speaker 2:But yet they will want you to stay there with a family, be loyal. And all this other stuff to us Was like, hey, I'm having a hard time feeding my family. You want me to stay here, so I'm going to just tell you, do with the information as you may and move accordingly.
Speaker 1:That's what I'm going to tell you to do Yep, and we're going to leave it there.
Speaker 2:Right, so talk about. Like I said, read your bio. You know I gave you the questions and one of the questions about got a chance to go ahead and, I believe, participate in this cybersecurity class and will you kind of open your mind up to something that Sabri didn't know about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I actually had a friend who was teaching RMF. So risk management framework for you all that don't know. So it falls under governance, risk and compliance. So really understanding the regulations and the security controls that go into being able to protect our data or protect our information or systems, et cetera. So I was able to sit in on a class. The class was for about six weeks and ended up extending into eight weeks and I just really wanted to get an idea of kind of like what RMF was and to kind of see you know how he taught and what it consisted of, because I had really had no understanding of what, like a boot camp or like what these courses were. Right, because six weeks to eight weeks is almost that's like nothing. Right, Very accelerated. So sat in on the class. Class came to an end and the next steps were to start applying for jobs. So it was like take your resume, put it out there and start getting interviews. So he had given you know people like a few examples of resumes and said, hey, this is how an appropriate resume looks. Take this, you know, tailor your resume to what you're looking for, put the class on it that you took the class for six to eight weeks and then just start putting it out there. Well, majority of the class couldn't figure out how to do that. I was like one of out of five people that were able to take my resume, put it out there and specifically like look for like a compliance role. And of course, you know, when I put it out there it was great and I say of course because I've always been good at writing, that's always been my thing and I really value that skill set that I have. But I was able to put my resume out there, got job interviews, landed roles, and when I looked back at some of the other students who were completely lost, I felt so bad for them because I said there's a disconnect here. So you take this course that you paid money for, but you're not getting the job. And the whole point of taking a course is to really get a job. If you didn't have to take a course and you could just start applying and figure it all out, people would do that right, and so that's actually how my company was born. Out of that you know it's actually going on four years now, but you know it was I saw that people needed someone to help them get to the finish line and I want it to be that person. I really started off just doing resumes, then I slowly began to do interview preparation, then it moved into, you know, linkedin optimization and now I'm here today where I'm a career coach and I'm really helping people smoothly make that transition. And it's not just people looking to get into tech I mean, a lot of my clients come from different fields as well but it's just majority are those that are looking to get into tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure. I think that's what I one of the things I realized too. I started this in 2020. And I realized a lot of the different things that are going out there, especially and I everything I did based off of is like off of my own career what I realized and how could I like help people? Or people are getting like all these different things. There are some people are telling me get stuff that doesn't even go with what they want to do.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:And I quickly noticed that, or it's just a mental game. I had a consultation Thursday night with a guy and he started telling me what he was doing at work as a. What is he? I think he's doing like IT support? He started telling me he was doing, oh yeah, provision user decommissioning them. I give him this access, this access, so I stopped them. So you do identity access management. He was like what? I'm not familiar with the term. I said I know you're not familiar with the term. They not going to tell you that's what you're doing at work because they don't want you to go get paid more.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:Because if you stay with support on your resume, that's the only type of job you're going to get. And that's why I tell people hey, do support six months, a year leave, but learn some stuff there.
Speaker 1:Take advantage.
Speaker 2:That's. That's like one of the things that run into a funny enough that you talked about there. They're taking the courses but they can't get a job, and you can a whole bunch of other bad advice. Like for me, I would have told people in that situation for the class you guys took hey, this needs to be labeled more of a really in detail project that you can showcase what you know, cause a lot of people will go do all these different courses, udemy or whatever and then throw the skills on their resume. But I'm like, if you're trying to pivot and I look at this, how am I just going to call you Cause you got these keywords on here, so it's why did you see? So I got a lot of matter of fact. We're just going to laugh at it. We're going to this is a different part. It's like the kind of pods I want to do cause it's funny, cause we're in similar space, so I'm going to play this for her or y'all, and then you'll listen to it. Let's see what a video is.
Speaker 6:I'm going to drop all the sauce in the video to how to get hired working from home, like, say, follow and take notes. Step one is creating a fire resume and including as many keywords in your document, because a lot of these tech companies are using AI or applicant tracking system to scan your actual PDF file and count up the number of keywords or relevant words to the actual job you're applying to. There's even some creative ways to include keywords on your section, but make them transparent. Don't tell anybody. I told you this, but there's actually AI tools you can use to send out thousands of applications for you, so you don't have to worry about it. Now you're going to have a really good LinkedIn profile too, and I know I'm throwing a lot at you, but I literally go step by step in all my free guides and in my free group on how to break into tech. And the last part is going to be recording your interviews and consistently getting better, because pro athletes always watch their film after a game, so you have to watch your interview film after you interview. Now, if you do all those steps, you research the company, you come prepared with good questions and you're confident and you express how interested you are in actually working for that company and then ask them what the next steps are and if you can get that next interview or call on the calendar. I guarantee you're going to stand out that 90% of the other candidates who are trying to get the same job as you are. I made a video of me cold calling and a 25 minute video of how I broke into tech. All you have to do is DM me on Instagram the word tech and I will send it to you for the free.
Speaker 2:The only thing I agreed with was the record yourself interviewing and kind of express why you want to work at a company. But I went and checked this like this I'll tell y'all.
Speaker 1:I went and checked it.
Speaker 2:He had his LinkedIn in the video so I went and looked at it. I said, oh, he a pup. He just got in. He don't know what he talking about, because anybody telling you to put words on a resume and make him transparent is really fooling you. Recruiters know, and that's not like some people say, oh, but the font real small and make it white, that's going to get you an interview. No, it's not. You can't just stuff keywords on your resume and think it's going to get you higher. I look at a lot of people with a word salad on their resumes all the time and they can't get interviewed.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, it's like overkill, like you know that they're literally just throwing the words on there, like they've actually haven't done the work.
Speaker 2:Yeah, their interview is not telling a story. So most people say, hey, your interview needs to be God to tell your story. I'm a person. Now there are disagreements. Some people like summaries. I don't like summaries. If you got a lot of experience and you're trying to pivot, I would say, hey, let's do career highlights. We can get short and sweet, to the point, and I've also seen some tips to where a lot of people focus on trying to tailor every resume. But it's like you really can just tailor those like career highlight points.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2:Versus, like just trying to take a little whole thing and that way works the way it works to me. So one of the things that I do with my clients like while I'm interviewing or getting interviews of big companies, I'm showing them. Like the other day I was preparing for something and I went and researched the company and see what kind of current news they had going on. I found the blog that was related to something current and I read up on it. When, in case they asked me a question or something about similar scenario, I already know about it. Right and there's other ways I know about it that I will discuss off the camera. But, needless to say, I'm no person that I'll show you. If I do it, if it's good enough for me, it should be good enough for you, and then that gives them the hope to keep on following my advice because I'm showing them. Hey, it works Right. But the bad thing is you can this was people I think. I forgot. You think, because somebody's following is very big. What they saying is true. There are only a couple of people who have a big following that actually tell have like content where it's like right and that that percent is like very small.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:The other people they are grifting. They are just I'm mad. I'm not mad at it, but you need no difference. I ain't really mad. They doing it because they getting paid, he getting money out of TikTok. I ain't mad at it. He doing what he gotta do because he young and he just gotten tech sales, like not too long ago. So it is what it is. But for you trying to follow that advice, that advice is not going to work for you. It possibly may work in tech sales, which tech sales is a non-technical role. It can pay a lot, but you got to do work to really make a lot of money. And people say that they're making, but it's not the, it's not the hardest type of road to get into. So that's the benefit of it. If you did a lot of stuff, you come from retail or you was driving cars, it's cool. But technical jobs, or either non-technical jobs that focus on transferable skills, or you can actually show value on your resume. That's what you need to show. We just did a and maybe you can come on the next one. We did a live resume review. Me Erica and Tiara and we had like 20 resumes, 20 resumes we reviewed and what I did was I either just made their name a rapper or something, but I'm telling you, seeing all type of resumes on there, we had somebody that had the pictures or their search they had at the top of the resume.
Speaker 1:Listen, it is so fun to tear apart resumes and I mean it's not like it's not to be mean, it's just it. Just after a while it just becomes like a thrill, at least to me, because I'm like, okay, this is wrong and I'm like, doing it so fast, like the way I can just go through, I can immediately look at a resume like a recruiter within seven, five, seven seconds and I know if it's good or not.
Speaker 2:And that's what I tell. People Say nobody got all the time to read all this stuff. They don't get to the point.
Speaker 1:And you know the picture, things with the certifications. That used to be a thing. I will say it was a thing like in 2019, 2020, people were putting that top of their resumes, okay, but now we're in 2023, going into 2024, you have to stay hip. You have to know what works and what does not work.
Speaker 2:I really don't recall it being too much of a thing, or at least for me, because I know those same things. Those credentials are supposed to be in your LinkedIn anyway, Absolutely. So I always say have your LinkedIn a little bit more detailed in your resume, Cause I mean people go view that all the time. I will also say I can't even remember, because it was just, and your LinkedIn should be, in my opinion, informal, so your resume should be more formal, but your LinkedIn.
Speaker 1:People should be able to go there and be able to see personality on there. So don't forget that, like you're not supposed to take everything that's on your resume and put it onto your LinkedIn. Now, experience okay, but you don't have to put every single bullet point. But you really need to showcase your talent, your skills, your experience, how likable as a person you are, how creative as a person you are on your LinkedIn, because that's where recruiters are going, that's where hiring managers are going.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Trust me, I can't. The people on the Patreon and my clients, they know I can't say it, cause I never know who's watching these things. People always be hating like hating stuff for real. But no, that's true. Like I have a client, he just got a internship pen testing with a company, with the guy actually, I mean I'm following each other on Twitter and we was talking about my client. He was like, yeah, man, I like that he posts all the stuff he's doing his blog and all these pen testing activities and this, and that he's posting and doing it. He's showing me what he's about. And that's one of the things I tell people like hey, if you're trying to pivot, you think applying to a thousand jobs is going to be so helpful for you, but it's not, because it's no way possible. You're going to be able to prep for a thousand jobs. Number two you're not even going to remember what jobs you applied to. That's going to be the hard part. Number three it's much more easier to network and get people to notice you on the jobs you really want, versus doing all that. And that's the things we go through. We go through hey, this is how you go get a recruit. This is how you find somebody on a team. This is how you do this. This is how you do that.
Speaker 1:People are scared of networking and, honestly, that's like number one In my opinion. You have to utilize the people around you to be able to get the job or whatever it is that you want, and if you can't utilize the people around you, then you don't have the right people around you. Like I can call up someone right now and I can go to, I can sit down with them and they will be able to introduce me to another individual who can help me. If you do not have that, you need to reevaluate your circle.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's the same thing. We know the men. I like to always correlate search for a job with dating. We know the men that's successful with women is not the men that's successful. We aren't scared to talk to women. We'll go up and how you do you want to drink? How you doing what's your name? Yada, yada, yada. Just do the same thing on LinkedIn. It's not hard. Like the worst a girl can ever tell you is no. Just like the worst a job can do is just reject you and she say, no, go on. There's a whole bunch of other women out there. You. We see the type of men these women talk to. So we see the type of people that get hired at these jobs. So don't be fazed by it. Everybody not going to answer a message. It happens to me. Everybody don't answer me. Sometimes I don't see them.
Speaker 1:Right, they don't see it. They connect, that's it.
Speaker 2:Cause, like one of the people and I work on this. This is also a key right. If you want somebody to answer you, you have to work on being social first and just sometimes going straight to the message. But this depends if they post a lot. So I've been able to get certain guests on my platform because, like even before I ever reached that, you may have interacted plenty of times on the timeline and that's how I reach out. So a lot of times, unless I just go to your page and I see, oh, you do something interesting in the bio, a lot of times I'm going to try to interact first and then say, hey, you know what you want to do. An intro call is talking about policy beyond the pot. But for bigger creators that you're probably interested in, or people on LinkedIn, interact with them on a, on a platform. A lot of stuff. Comment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, comment like their blogs. Start a conversation. Hey, I recently came across your your post. You know I can really relate to this. I wanted to talk to you a lot more. You know, are you free? Things like that, like you, have to be likable. You can't be afraid of rejection. You're not going to get anywhere if you are consistently living in fear.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I underrated thing you guys are not doing. You're not putting notes in your connection request. I have over a thousand connection requests on LinkedIn. I don't accept everybody cause I kind of want to monitor what's on my LinkedIn timeline. So I always tell people hey, please send me a note so I can see why you're following me and who you are Right and the people that do that I follow them back.
Speaker 1:You need to give that simple introduction and again, it shouldn't be you asking for something. It should never start off with you asking for something. Going back to dating, you're not going to reach out to somebody and immediately ask if they just want to have sex, right?
Speaker 2:It's rude, I don't know, do's do that Well, it's rude. They, they, a lot of them are, are, are stupid things to do. That They'll do that. There are, like some women, that'll do that. They don't know how to be.
Speaker 1:Oh my God, their lambs. Don't be that person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that is like it is, but that's the thing too. That's why I get on two people about your soft skills matter. People like to work with people. They like to work with the person who's the smartest. Probably didn't always get the job. They probably didn't have a good conversation sometimes with the interviewer. They probably least interested.
Speaker 1:Too awkward they're not likable and that's that's a big thing. I think jobs nowadays are looking at soft skills more and then they're looking at how you can solve problems. I know that's something that you mentioned. Are you a problem solver? And it's not just about telling. Your resume can tell, but your resume can also show, and you do that through having what we call qualitative measureables, so numbers, percentages, dollar amounts. It's just showing people. Okay, I was able to solve this problem and it was able to have my company make more money. It was able to save money. It was able to make a client happy, Things like that. People want to see that on your resume and they also want to hear that in the interview.
Speaker 2:I totally agree, and you have to think like that because now technology is actually enabling us to do more with less. So what is going to be the tipping point in your interviews? Because some of the stuff now they don't really need you. Maybe the code we got a machine learning AI. It can help us develop some of the code. We just need you to hopefully be a person on the call who can think things through and come up with a good solution. Use cases, do your own research, come back and give us some stuff, cause everybody's busy doing a million. One thing I'm telling you companies are actually getting a little leaner now, so they're going to need you to be able to have more value.
Speaker 1:Besides, maybe, the one role you do, yeah, People need to start thinking about their value. What can they add to a company If you don't know that? Now is the time to start thinking about that. You know, am I really valuable or am I just like everybody else? You know you don't want to get lost in the sauce.
Speaker 2:This video will be sponsored by Level Careers. It has a 14 day money bag guarantee. It's a we sell pays course for your reimbursement and counts for continuing education. Here are some of the reasons why you could choose stop security high demand, job security, competitive salary, work variety and fulfilling work. The national average salary of information security analysis of 113,000. You're short through is Josh Maddacour, and here is the brief overview of the course Theory introduction security refresher, security frameworks, security regulations and standards, security operations. Then you have these great labs with Azure, lock-in-and-mundry Microsoft Signals, secure Cloud configuration, and they help you with job plan and job hard execution. Use my code to try out level careers. You get 10% off by using my code and you'll be taking the next step in propelling your career to new height. Now back to our schedule program, right, and so here is another one that I posted on Twitter, and you're probably familiar with this guy, but he got ran off Twitter.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh.
Speaker 2:People were trying to defend him. I made a link.
Speaker 1:People will run you off Twitter for sure.
Speaker 2:I'm standing on business. You ain't going to run me off Twitter.
Speaker 1:Anything.
Speaker 2:I say I stand 10 toes down behind. But this person, this I know people are fickle. He don't stand 10 toes behind this and also people are trying to defend him on my YouTube video. This is because I posted on YouTube and I think my TikTok and I was just like I don't care what y'all are saying. This dude got ran off of here and I couldn't stitch or do it this video for a reason, because he don't want nobody to come back to him. But here it is.
Speaker 3:Only 500,000 people in the world have their CompTIA network plus. Only 500,000 people in the world have their CompTIA security plus. But not everybody who gets a network plus also has a security plus. The total number of people in the world right now who have their network plus and their security plus is probably closer to 50,000. But consider that we have over 750,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the US alone. Over 3 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs worldwide. So if you get your network plus and your security plus, you're in a good position to start your career in cybersecurity. You add in getting other certifications for minor skills like AZ900 and Splunk Core, and then learn hard skills like Linux, python and traffic analysis, make an e-portfolio and a one page resume and all of a sudden, you're at the top 1% of applicants without experience. If it was so easy then everybody would do it, but most people are not determined enough to buckle down for 90 days and get it done. If you're one of those few that can see the vision for how you can start your cybersecurity career, it can and should be done in 90 days. I did it. A whole bunch of my students have done it. It's about 300 hours of hard study every day for 90 days. It's happened before and it'll happen again.
Speaker 2:So number one and he forgot to leave by someone else to use the same on Twitter. He would tell people oh yeah, make up, you got a degree. They're not going to check it. Applied 2000 roles.
Speaker 1:Oh gosh, that reminds me of somebody else, about making your fake degree on Canva you talking about the girl, the PMP. Look her. Yeah, I got her muted. She follows me. But I got her muted, she follows you. Well, okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know what's funny. Before the her fake PMP thing, I actually let's just try and say yo, I don't agree with what you say, but I love to have you on the show. She never responds.
Speaker 1:Wow, yeah, she would be great to have on a podcast.
Speaker 2:I want to get people to honestly disagree with absolutely like because if you can convince me you should be all right, but if you can't convince me, then I think that's the issue. People know they ain't going to convince me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because a lot of these people have been able to convince a lot of people, and I mean even at text giving, I ran into this girl who was getting her network plus and she's like, yeah, I'm not sure, should I really even be getting my network plus, because I was told I need my network plus before I get my security plus. So that reminds me of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I say this to each his own, like I told people, this is why I'm not high on certifications. Now, granted, I tell people, if you want to get a government role, get your certifications. They meet a certain level.
Speaker 1:They need those certifications and education a lot of the times to go work into those and they're interviewed, but I heard they're actually going to start getting rid of some of that stuff. Are they?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and one of my friends that's a prior military, a currently works for Lockheed. He was telling me how to have a friend do this new initiative, where that's going to go away. But back in 2013, I studied for I read the book and like a week or two, a real thick book and by July I had my sec plus no people security experience. I had to like a forensic class. I went to court but I didn't. I wasn't ready to work nowhere.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So that's in my. That was what two months, june, july, and all I had at the time I was working retail at Target. So the video on here is selling you two to three hours a day. You can do all these things when people have kids. People work full time jobs. That's a lot of information to digest to possibly get you nowhere, because no way possible you're going to retain all the information.
Speaker 1:That's similar to like a nine weeks, unless you're genius Right, unless you're Mike Ross, yeah, Mike Ross or this girl.
Speaker 2:I've been watching this new show on Netflix called the night action or the night agent.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, I watched night agent, I was good.
Speaker 2:And I didn't know. The chick had a cybersecurity company and she got killed by insider threat from whoever. I haven't got from like on episode two, but I was telling my girls when I say, yeah, the show interests me because that's what we deal with. We looking for like insider threats.
Speaker 1:Right, no, it's a really good show.
Speaker 2:But, needless to say, it's no way possible. You going to digest no-transcript. What is it? Security, supposedly networking, get some type of Linux skills and all these other stuff. What are you gonna be doing on the e-portfolio?
Speaker 1:So he was throwing too much out there and it is truly based on the individual. You know, we always say that I mean, I get that these people, they have a certain amount of time in their TikToks or whatever to be able to appeal to the masses, so they say whatever. But just because that individual's saying that and they may have 100,000 followers I don't know how many he has doesn't mean that it's right information. It truly is dependent on what you want to do. I find a lot of my clients come to me and they have zero clue about the role that even interests them. It's just, it's almost like oh, I wanna be in cybersecurity.
Speaker 2:Why.
Speaker 1:Why And-.
Speaker 2:Oh, I wanna be a sub-security analyst. Okay, a sub-security analyst, do what? Cause there could be many different sub-security.
Speaker 1:Right, and they don't even know I always break it down as well. I saw somebody on social media that makes 160,000 a year as a cybersecurity analyst, and that's what they wanna be Right?
Speaker 2:and then that's when I say okay, why you wanna do it. Okay, what do you currently do? Well, why not go do this in cybersecurity versus this? I'm like yo skill set. I said, if it's more project management, product management, go do that. You can do that. You can go be a technical product manager in cybersecurity. Why are you gonna go waste all this time and try to learn how to code and do this, learn how to do forensics? You ain't got that time.
Speaker 1:The Uber driver. She was like you have to know how to code to be in tech, right? I said no, there's non-technical roles and there's technical roles, and even the technical roles don't all require coding. So people have this misconception.
Speaker 2:And it's helpful if you know how to do it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:But that's not how you can learn that if you get a job Like I'm all for, hey, lower, better entry, let's just get us a job, let's network, let's get some skills, let's get the company to pay for our certifications and level up that way Versus you trying to do a whole bunch of stuff. In a short period of time, and then what I run into with clients and we just start talking about stuff, right. So we have with clients is someone don't listen, they're not teachable, they're not teachable.
Speaker 1:They're not coachable. Literally, they'll come to you and say I wanna be in a new job in two months and then they don't wanna put the effort to get there, and I think that's something that I was speaking with you about very shortly, but I was saying how a lot of people. It's really important to give assessments and I know that you do assessments as well. It's important to assess your clients, like I have. A lot of my clients come in and I really need to understand their personal lives. If I don't understand their personal lives, it's going to be a problem later on down the road, because their personal is always going to end up trickling into their professional and the work that we do together. They may not have a lot of time that they make you want to believe that they have, or they may have some other things going on that could ultimately affect their timeline that they have in mind and it's not realistic. It's really important to sit with your clients and to assess them and know what truly it is that they want and to make sure that you set expectations.
Speaker 2:Definitely, and that's why sometimes I ask my clients you married, you got a kid, you got a family that's keeping you in the city? Because now we're not seeing this many remote positions?
Speaker 1:We're not.
Speaker 2:And so I'm like your location may be directly impacting you finding a job and so I'm telling them, yo, you might have to move. Or if I'm telling you, hey, we need to apply some jobs, like you cannot be successful if you're not applying the jobs. Or one of my pet peeves is if I make your resume and then I look at it again and you've changed stuff that I did for you for a reason oh my gosh, you don't even tell us that you changed something. Yeah, I was like I didn't put that on there, and then you're putting it out there and then you're like, oh, I'm not nothing's happening.
Speaker 1:Well, it could be because you changed something and you didn't tell us that you changed it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And then I'm asking them hey, what have you been working on? I have a new client, like every other day he's sending me something. I get it. He want to be in cyber. I'm like, bro, whatever you're working on, like your current skills don't fit that. So I was like, yes, dude, I think you could do it, but you hadn't shown us anything on paper that you worked on that. So I was like I don't know what you'll be a good fit for that. So I'm like let's just stick. Like I've been telling them, let's just stick. Learn about our DNA access management right now. You kind of do some of that stuff. Now. Let's get a little bit better at it, let's do some stuff, or?
Speaker 1:They have to stick to it. I feel like a lot of the clients. They're in a hurry, they're trying to go nowhere fast. That's what's going to happen because they're trying to keep up with the Benjamins. They want what they're seeing on social media and they're not willing to, like you said, put in the work to get there.
Speaker 2:But I will say I have the benefit of having realistic clients. I do talk to them. I was like yo, one of the guys looking at some role. I was just like, well, you need to. If we do take a role like I, don't want it to not be a role where you can't take care of your family, so we want to make sure if we can at least do it lateral. But I'm just honest with them, like I have them all record their interviews so I can listen to them and I dissect them. Hey, you said you did a lot of filler words. I was like, just slow down. If you don't know something, just tell me you don't know, but you'll be able to find out the answer. Like most of us Google every day, every day, and we can find out answers.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And also, you know, you could I mean, depending on how you are able to do your interviews you're able to, I mean, still in a sense be Googling if you're in the interview, I mean. But again, that depends on how fast you work and how your brain operates right, because not everybody can do that, so not everybody's a finessor.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or you just ask just clarify questions of what that mean, or what is that? Sometimes you may recognize something as something else and they're saying it a different way. You don't understand it.
Speaker 1:Exactly. There's been times when I'll say, actually I don't have the answer for you right now, but I'm pretty sure, as we continue on in this interview, I'll have it for you in about 10 minutes, and then I end up circling back around. Then I answer the question.
Speaker 2:I did that. I did okay. This was a good question to ask me interview.
Speaker 1:You know what?
Speaker 2:I'm gonna make sure I knock that question out. And so now, if they ask me another interview, I'm gonna knock it out. That's what my goal is to get you to keep on interviewing, because we're just gonna build, build, build. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Don't be afraid to take the interview and even so, if you can't answer a question in your interview, you can always follow up. By the way, it's always important to follow up after an interview. Anyways, you should be making sure that you send those thank you emails and in your thank you email you can say hey, I remember you asked this question during the interview and unfortunately, you know, I was so rattled I wasn't able to give you a response. What I meant to say is and then say what you were supposed to say in that interview. They'll respect you more and they'll remember you, because a lot of people are not sending follow up emails.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I say sometimes it's like here to miss, I think sometimes on the company. Some companies say, hey, sending us a thank you really don't matter because we ain't looking at that. So I would say it depends. Some companies like it. I have a thank you letter template that I've used, that's. I think, it's helped me because I used to. What I'll do is a cheat code go to your interview, listen back to it, take the notes, draw up your thank you letter and then gear it towards that person. And that's where you can do that. A lot of people don't do that. I was like I promise one of the simplest tricks Like my stuff is simple, Like I'm a boxing fan Shout out to Devin Haney. I told y'all Devin Haney was going to be Regis Prograde because he was overrated and the new. But when you just keep it simple and go back to the basis and the foundations of everything, you're going to always be a good interviewer or a good employee. When you're trying to get too cute and too fancy, that's when you start messing up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely Are you. Are you thinking about other things that people have told you instead of just sticking to the game plan? I always say interviewing is like marketing, and I really wish that they taught this in school, just like they taught finance right, we really wish that they taught those things as cores. But you have to be a salesperson for yourself. You have to market yourself, you know, and you really need to practice. That's the only way to get better at interviewing, and I think it also comes down to knowing yourself. There's those individuals that always land the job. Why? Because they know themselves, they're confident and they're able to speak their truth and they're able to translate that in something that makes sense to an interviewer. A lot of people get into interviews and they think, oh, I'm being interviewed and it's just me being interviewed.
Speaker 2:You've got to interview them.
Speaker 1:No, you need to interview them. It's not just about having those questions prepared, but you need to be having a conversation, as the interview is going on Like you're talking to your friend. That's how you need to look at it. Stop thinking that these interviewers are so superior. It's like when people think that celebrities are so superior. They're humans just like you.
Speaker 2:They bleed the same way as you, they just got more money.
Speaker 1:They die the same way as you. They just have more money or the interviewer is just in a higher position. But, trust me, interviewers have to interview at some point too right? So always remember that it needs to be a two-way street. Have a conversation with your interviewer and, trust me, it will change how your interviewing process goes.
Speaker 2:For sure, and one of the things that I was thinking about when you were talking and I'm trying to think if it's going to come back to me it was about clients and I was thinking I don't know if it was about them being successful interviewing. It was something I thought about.
Speaker 1:It was about being coachable, teachable, no.
Speaker 2:It was something else and it's probably come back to me as we talk. But I think, like you said, I've had clients where. So a lot of times I will work together exclusively like three months, but I'm still helping them throughout, whatever they go through. And so I tell them straight up hey, this ain't gonna be easy. I got people that's got all different type of backgrounds. That's like people that are more technical, people that's coming from a different background, but they work on a lot of good projects and I was like you can do this. You're just gonna have to keep interviewing and get better and eventually I think you'll end that one.
Speaker 1:But some people think they can just interview for three, like they put their resume out there. It's been three weeks. Why am I getting rejections? Why am I not getting jobs? On average? Last time I checked, it takes at least three months for somebody to land a new role, and that also means they are very, very, very aggressive with their applying. And I'm not talking about submitting five applications a day. I'm not talking about submitting 10 applications a day. I'm talking about these people go over the top to get their applications out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's why I tell people hey, look, go find a recruiter, send them the scripts that I gave you in a note and, if they accept you the next day, follow up, tell them what role you applied to, give them the requisition number and if they reply, they may say okay, hey, let's set up an interview. Like matter of fact, I applied to a gig, I did the screening, but when I found out because the gig didn't have the salary on there, so I was like oh, not as too low. So I knew friends in my network that probably worked for them and I had them all apply and I reached out to the recruiter and she ain't saying that in the pack. I said, well, here's her email. And this is the tip Most of the time you might not reach that recruiter on LinkedIn, but if you got the email, most of them they're gonna see it. So now most of everybody who I got the email to, they got a screening coming up.
Speaker 1:See.
Speaker 2:So also working with me is not just me helping you, but now you're immersed into my network. People reach out to me all the time hey, do you know anybody be a good fit? So a friend of mine they have like an associate or junior security analyst role coming open and he hit me up you got anybody that's good for this. And I did and they talked and he said I think he'll be a good fit. It's one of my current clients, is pretty much an active fireman, but he has his master's in cybersecurity. He's intern at a sock and did some other stuff. So he's just trying to make that transition. And I was like dude, we're gonna get there. You just gotta keep on keeping on in the fight. Like you're coming from a different background, but the background that you have is really in line with what you'd be doing. Cause you do incident response in the real world. You're going to burning buildings and you guys got protocols on how you get these people out. Or if you're an EMT, you do all these different things and you recognize what to do for this patient and that patient. That's how I always explain incident response to people. I say, hey, it's like being a cop, fireman and the detective in paramedic all at once, but it's just on a network. But it's different things that you do being an IR and if you can do that, that's the good part. A lot of people aren't slowing down and kind of trying to understand the job function. They're still looking at it from their level and not the level that they'd be interviewing at, and that's one of the bigger issues. And so when I explained it to a client cause as he seen one of my posts that post I made about like here's why some poor people are struggling in interviews he was like, hey, this sound like me, it was about him. But I was like, hey, it was at a high level to make good content for everybody. And I was telling him. I was like, hey, look at, instead of somebody asking you about multi-fact authentication and how you feel about it on the end user support side, look at it from a security compliance control side, about why you need it or benefits of that. Like Octa just recently got breached not too long ago and I was reading a blog about CloudFair and how they actually pretty much averted like going through a big incident and they had a lot of their privileged access accounts connected to a hardware token key versus having it like virtual where somebody can do the prompts.
Speaker 5:I hate that.
Speaker 2:Like that happened to me other day on my personal Microsoft account. I got a prompt that I didn't recognize. I was like I ain't into my password, nowhere. How am I getting the prompt? And I seen the login activity from somewhere that I didn't recognize. So I just really reset my password. But on the end of even when being a security, if this was like an enterprise account, I could say, hey, automatically block logins that we have never seen logging in from that place in 90 days, and then we'll send you some. Hey, is this you trying to log on? Right, you can do things like that. Those type of policies can help you, but for one, they don't know that because they haven't been introduced to it. So it takes a person, a mentor or someone can tell them kind of the things that you can speak or how you can impress somebody. So that's where I come in. It's like I'll take things that we do at work, relay it to them and I'll show them some stuff so they can say, okay, you need to say this to impress them. Nobody is gonna say this because they don't know this.
Speaker 1:Right, and sometimes people think that they can do it on their own and I mean that's fine. I mean see how far it gets you right. But if it's not getting you anywhere and you've been doing it for a while, it's probably time to invest in a mentor, invest in a coach to help you through.
Speaker 2:Definitely, definitely, and so also what I wanna get on real quick is I wanna talk about you deserve IT and I just wanna talk about briefly kind of the services you offer and kind of what's your steps for it. People wanna you know after this interview, kind of get with you and learn what you know and be helpful that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. You deserve IT consulting or you deserve it. It's kind of interchangeable. It is a career services firm, so we do focus on helping people navigate the job market, so it's not just for those looking to transition into a different field or specifically transition into tech. We have a lot of clients from different backgrounds. So, whether you wanna level up, you want more money, you need help with negotiation, you need help for creating a roadmap and being able to land the role that you want six months from now and you wanna be proactive, we're here to assist with that. Some of the services we offer the main one's going to be career coaching, resume revamp. So how that works essentially is we do one-on-one walkthroughs with individuals, reviewing their resumes and telling them where they can definitely make it better. We also do interview preparation, linkedin optimization, and then we also do help with, as I mentioned, negotiation, thank you emails, things like that. So those are just an idea of the services that are being offered. For the most part, the career coaching is like the most sold service, so there is a month to month option and then there's also a three month program that you can opt into. Just depends on if you want a longer commitment or if you kinda want something that's on the flexible side. If you are looking to get in contact with us, you can definitely head on over to our website, which is wwwyouasintheletteru deserve itconsultingcom, and there's a schedule now and we do offer free 30 minute consultations. If you have no idea of kinda, what is going to be the best route for you, Nice.
Speaker 2:I always like to possibly do a consult with first of my purchase coaching for me, because if you come to me and you don't have any skills, then it's just like, okay, I'm gonna try, but listen, you're gonna have to do a whole bunch of stuff to get a gig, right, it's important to be able to almost have that interview to see if that person's a great fit for your coaching services.
Speaker 1:So you're not meant to, as a coach and as a therapist and everything, you're not meant to take every single client that comes your way. Sometimes you can send them in a different direction, to somebody better who can assist them, and that's great. So it's really important to be able to have those consultations to be able to determine if you can help them or not.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I agree, I send people other places all the time, just like, hey, I'm not the best with those roles, I'm gonna send you to this person because that's what they do. If the people out there are watching, what do you think and you probably already have this down in your pitch deck, because I just know you do what is like the average salary increase you had like for your clients?
Speaker 1:Average. I'd say the average is probably around 45,000, 50,000. That generally has been the average increase. Some clients have been truly blessed to make a lot more, but I'd say around 45,000, 50,000 is the average.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I haven't quantified everything, so I just threw a number. I said 20, 25. But I also say just opinions, like one guy coming in on my TikTok. He was like man, how do I get the 80,000 jobs rolls? And I was like, hey, you ain't gonna like this answer, but I'm gonna tell you just apply, just apply to the roll, that's all you gotta, do you just?
Speaker 1:never know. You'll hear. Sometimes people say don't apply to the roll if you don't match at least 70 to 80% of the criteria. That's on the job post and I get what people say, that. But I've gotten rolls where I did not meet even half of the requirements and I know I tend to get rolls because of my personality, and that's the one thing I wanna talk about personality hires. I mean, if you wanna go in a different direction, we could talk about that later. But people talk about personality hires and I think it's really important when you're building a team to have people that do have great personalities, people that have great leadership skills, people who are able to problem solve, people who may not be so technical but they can work well within a team and keep a team moving in the right direction. It's not always about having a skill set and I think people forget that Some people don't have personalities, which is why what you were saying just because you're smart and you may have what the company's looking for, sometimes you're not getting hired because you're just boring. You could just be smart and be good at what you do, but what do you have to offer outside of that? People need to be able to interact with you. People need to be able to talk to you and to trust you, and you need to be likable.
Speaker 2:I can tell you get on the cars and I'm like, okay, I have a hard stop at 4 pm.
Speaker 1:Ah, for what my clients?
Speaker 2:Anybody.
Speaker 1:Or anybody, yeah, like in my interviews and stuff like that. No. I don't say that.
Speaker 2:I don't know what it's term. I have never heard it to people about the TikTok. It's this lady, what's her name? I don't know what her name is, but she pretty much acts like the white women that are the project managers. And how she's talking on the meetings and stuff. It's hilarious to me. I was like this is crazy.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. So I'm not a fan of meetings. I think people even at my jobs. No, I'm not a fan of meetings. I hate that. I've never liked being in meetings. If we can literally just have a conversation via email, please save us time. That's one thing I get compliments about at work. My manager will say Marquesha, somebody came to me and said that you do not like in meetings. You don't waste any time. If a meeting needs to end in five, 10 minutes, you're wrapping it up, and that's that. I pride myself on that. There's no need to waste time and whatever else you have to say, you can say it in an email trust me, I'm mad.
Speaker 2:we only have circles, no more. I don't do it every week, I know, but read this. This is funny. This was told to me. This is my manager saying something to me, or whatever. You only gotta read it out loud. But I was just talking about it because it's hilarious.
Speaker 1:What? No, I do not put my camera on either. I know my manager hates me for that, but you know what I mean. I'm going to come on camera maybe four times a year, and I think that's good enough, right? I think so.
Speaker 2:For me. Those people have met me in person, they know I'm approachable. Yeah, exactly, they want me to put my face on camera for a meaning that sometimes two to three minutes For people that are about to get off shift like it'd be pissing me off. That's that micro management, white people, bullshit or people come to meetings dirty. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like they'll literally say oh my God, I'm so dirty looking, so why are you on camera? Just save us all the idea of looking at you and just get off camera, because it's not a requirement.
Speaker 2:Right, sometimes I don't be one. Honestly, a lot of times the means we have shouldn't be means. It could have been an email.
Speaker 1:Exactly my point and I will advocate for that. I will tell people when they're wasting my time. Yes, I will.
Speaker 2:I just don't like being on meetings where it's nothing with crowd of me to say anything. Now I feel some. I say hey, we got an incident going on. He'd call you, and then we going back and forth.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:But if not, I was like, what's the point?
Speaker 3:It's stupid.
Speaker 2:I don't really care, it's dumb. I find that I have to be like with the older type of people, older managers, like they do that. Yeah, I'm like, fam, I don't, you don't have to see me, even if we was in office, especially the woman.
Speaker 1:I don't know, I've never had bad.
Speaker 2:I've always had good stuff with women.
Speaker 1:Because you're a man and I felt this is the opposite. A woman to a woman like they're just nasty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then a man to a woman.
Speaker 1:He's like super nice to the woman.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think so. I think it's also I think it depends it's new ones. I've seen specifically y'all cause you know how many like it's crazy. I don't go to nobody's podcast where they tell them you need to bring this guest on, this guest on. If you're about diversity, you bring these people on. I'm like fam, this is my podcast, you can do what you want, right. And I'm like second of all, you don't know who I'm planning to bring on the pod, like I have other races that I'm planning to get them to come on the pod, but it's like this is majority of my audience. This is the exposure to five years from now. A little girl will see this and say, oh my gosh, I can go be in cybersecurity.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. People want to see the value. So whoever you're going to bring on, that's valuable. Have them. Yeah, that's really what it's about.
Speaker 2:Now we had a hot take. That's a pretty funny. We would talk about what do the Indian recruiters do with your resumes? Yes, and like I don't like immediately you give them resume, hey, give me your last four and do all this other stuff and I'm like I don't know, fam, like why are you pestering me so bad? I don't even know. Like a lot of times they'll say they're hiring for the company, but I really don't know if they are hiring for the company. They're not hiring for the company. I never hear anything back.
Speaker 1:No, it's just all a ploy to get your information and to be able to pretty much steal it and just replace it with their information. They want to be able to build their own resumes. I really need people to stop falling for the Indian recruiters. You'll see a lot of them send you an email and the email will have like different fonts and font sizes, right, like in the immediate, like you know, don't even apply for that role. And then, especially when they're asking for the right to represent, or they're asking for you to provide the last four of your social, or they're saying are you a US citizen? Like those things, like a regular recruiters generally not asking that in the immediate. They're asking that when you get in the screening call and they're never asking for your social to last four. That's only HR. So if a company's asking for the last four of your social, it's a red flag and I've heard a lot of people fall for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I heard recruiters. So my God, nate Wiley used to do that type of recruiting back in the day. He was like he said man, I'm gonna keep it honest with you, like back in the day we had to do that because everybody was like kind of having the same clients but he was telling them he's like we probably not gonna get a lot of people because people don't feel comfortable with doing it. He was like so I totally understand. I also would say that I always say okay, well, who's the project with?
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you even have like the project in hand, like, or are you just collecting?
Speaker 2:resumes to be able to do your proposal. And so if they say, if they say you on the call, go to the career site and see if it's on there, like if it ain't on there, then I'm like, okay, cool.
Speaker 1:And look at the reviews too. You can go on Glassdoor, you can go on Google and you can see what people are saying about the company and generally from experience especially if it's these Indian recruiters people are saying this is a scam or this is not legit, or they don't really have the contracts, things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I've never gotten a job from them. It's always like, hey, they'll start getting aggressive with you. Hey, can you send it to me?
Speaker 5:Man.
Speaker 2:I'll get to it when I can, so they'll get aggressive.
Speaker 1:You send it you'll never hear from them again, ever. Because what they're doing is and never send your resume in Word version, by the way, always send it in PDF, especially when it comes to formatting and things like that. But you can also lock your resume from anybody well, if you send it in PDF, from anybody being able to copy what's on it. So what they do is, if you send your resume via Word, they will just change your contact information and put theirs and then they'll send that off for other jobs and such. And, of course, some of these companies are hiring people in India because it is cheaper and I get it. They're starting to outsource to different countries. So that's something to also be on the lookout for. When you're looking for a role, Start thinking about how long is your role going to be available? Is AI going to take over it, or is somebody else that's 17 hour going to take over your role?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that, and also it's one of those inside of third things where it was study that came out a while ago and it was like people that worked overseas for companies were sending information to their countrymen and not in money and other stuff, so it was stealing stuff. So it was like that's kind of like the thing that you run into when you do that, when you can just hire, like for the life of me I don't want to talk to people when I call customer service that don't speak English.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't either.
Speaker 2:I was like why you can't even understand me? I can't understand you.
Speaker 1:At all. They're working in a call center.
Speaker 2:You should talk to your own people. You should talk to them.
Speaker 1:In the call center.
Speaker 2:Oh no, this is crazy. And this is just one more. Right, we talked about boot camps, we talked about courses, but this is why I don't like and what's my boy name, jamil Leo Grand Prince, he was talking about on his Twitter like, I don't like people giving unsolicited advice when you don't have experience in that. Like, your opinion should not matter. There's a TikTok that I'm going to play right now where this girl was talking about bees, but she don't know for one. She doesn't know what she's talking about until she's not even in the industry. You shouldn't be commenting on that because you don't know what you're talking about. And it's hilarious and I'm going to. I'm going to play it for you because it's hilarious, because we'll probably start wrapping it up.
Speaker 4:Today. I received a cease and desist for hosting my own free.
Speaker 5:GovTech happy hour. About the information. I don't care how I look. All I have to say is people like this nine times out of 10, if they are selling you on how to make money nine times out of 10, it is a grift. If you are so much of an expert in this specific field, if you were so skillful in government, tech or tech industry and you were so good at it, why aren't you in that industry now? Now I know some of y'all her fans might say, oh, cause she's making more money teaching us exactly that's how she makes her money. That's how she made her money by teaching other people or selling courses to other people, selling you a dream. Essentially, you cannot go and apply for corporate America jobs with just a Google certificate alone. It won't even stand up that alone. If you get a job interview A lot of times, these people know exactly who to target. They know that the black community and black people we are a small minority within these industries for a numerous amount of reasons, but one of those reasons is because a lot of us are not, simply are not aware. So because we are not aware, that makes us more vulnerable. It's susceptible to grifters like that. Notice how I'm calling her a grifter and not a scam. And nine times out of 10, it always starts off as a free course, a free guide or a free seminar and then, while you're there, they sell you on a user experience. So it's probably a nice ball, nice food, whatever it may be, beautiful ambiance just to upsell you and get you lost into the dream so you can constantly be in a cycle of consumerism. It's not designed for you to go on and to prosper and to make $200,000 plus in that industry. It's so that you can become heavily reliant upon useless information. And if it's not useless, it's simple information you can get on a quick Google search. So please do not be dismayed, my black people.
Speaker 2:Like I'll let you go. What are the?
Speaker 1:comments saying.
Speaker 2:Are people in the comments that are not in the industry? I don't know. So, like I know I'm coming for a fact and said you missed the mark on this one, and some dude actually just recently responded to me telling me oh well, you should go buy Andrew Tate's course, and I'm like I'm gonna flame him in a second whenever I get a chance. But I was like she don't know what she's talking about. Cause it's not that situation. That's why I don't. She was actually clout-saging.
Speaker 1:Cause all the hashtags Well it wasn't even relevant to what Bees was talking about. So, Bees was talking about a cease and desist from, I guess, if you don't know, from what is it? Blackgovtech sending her a cease and desist, and so for that individual to use that as a stitch, it's definitely to clout-chase, because she knows that it's almost a controversy right now, and so she knows that more people are going to be searching that and she's going to get a lot more followers perhaps.
Speaker 2:Right, and let's do this because people love to use words loosely, but they be loud and wrong. Definition of grift to obtain money or properly illicitly, as in confidence game, to acquire money, property illicit. That's all this is. Let's go with the grifter. Really I don't want to do this. Give me the X, there we go. I'll just click on the grifter, it's a lot of hate out there. It's the same thing. That's not what grifting is. Grifting is what your girl Pearl used to do Taking all black people, especially black men, talking points and going to repurpose them on her platform like they hers. That's grifting. That's how she was getting paid. She didn't know what she was talking about. Every time you would get down to it, she didn't know what she was talking about. What Beast was doing is not Like she had been doing her thing for a while with a discord, telling people what they need to do, getting on the game on how she used to work overseas. So that's why I was like she's literally telling people her experience.
Speaker 1:And if people want to know more, then again, I don't know if Beast sells courses.
Speaker 2:She's actually helped me out. She did this like it's not financial advice, but she did put out this book, financial Starter Kit, and it was also a course that she did, but that actually was like a helpful course.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if people want to learn more, then they can go buy to learn more, like that's business. I don't care who you are.
Speaker 2:I'm about to put my coaching as a course because I just don't have time to coach, like a lot of times, I actually continue doing it.
Speaker 1:The group coaching is kind of where I'm headed now. If you're going to want one on one, that is going to start being a yeah, a higher price is just because it's very time consuming and I'm kind of moving into the realm of needing more of my time to be able to put things like this program together for you all.
Speaker 2:So did I send you that podcast episode with my Gordon?
Speaker 1:I don't know.
Speaker 2:Okay, I sent it to you. But he was talking about how his coaching and how it used to be, I think, like a what was it? Like? Two thousand, something like an hour, and so where one time a client just paid him 40,000 for eight hours, he was like man, I need to go up. I don't need somebody to be able to be able to pay for like my whole day at $40,000. So he went up and it was just a lot of free gaming and so if I didn't send it to you, I'll send it to you.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, definitely Imagine me. I want to listen to it.
Speaker 2:But no, it's a thing like it's not a grip, because most of us have something you don't the knowledge and experience Everybody else do, something You'd be surprised with. People are paying money for business coaches how to get in certain rooms.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, especially when you're up there like a lot of these executive people are paying so much money to other coaches just to be able to level up.
Speaker 2:So that coach I said he like charges a lot but you get game because it's like exactly this knowledge isn't Google like the way that I do things. It's not going to just tell you, hey, if you go or how do I land a role, and it's going to get you a whole bunch of stuff, but it's not going to be actionable, not like the way I do it, not the way I'm showing you that I did it. So that's why you can't just be simple and Google, but I don't like that because it's cloud chasing. Number one. Number two she's not even in the industry, so she doesn't know she's talking about right, because if she did her research she would see oh, she may go for money working overseas and making investments.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And now most of the money is coming from actually just working with brands. Like she's getting some money from other stuff, but it's not. It's not like she's saying, hey, go do this and that, like she actually advocates for people just to get gov tech roles, not necessarily just like a cybersecurity, but just getting a role in gov tech, because if you can have a feeder role, you got a better chance of getting a cyber, which I've been telling us people now too. Like hey, now a lot of y'all are going to do like feeder roles first. Like if you're trying to do something technical because it's going to be harder to get in now, a lot of people will burn over the pandemic. A lot of people don't put in the work. Like I said, we're talking about my I bring days, bring up on the pod like once every month. But I was like I tell my clients all the time, if you ain't trying to put that work in like day, if you go from 2020 to what he's doing now he just made his announcement by leaving data doc like you're not going to be at that level. And that's when I say you got to have elite skills to get to a level like his and that comes with studying. It does A lot of y'all not doing that? A lot of y'all do and I'm not. I ain't falling off with one that had a nice car, had a nice girl on your arm, the nice shoes you want to flex, you know, had a linen shirt unbuttoned with your chest showing I ain't mad at it, but you got to put in the work.
Speaker 1:But, as we said, you have to continue studying and you need to always be growing that skill set and it's really important to focus on what interests you the most. I feel like a lot of people too they're. They're wanting to get into tech, but nothing is of a passion to them, and I guess it's fine. I mean, sometimes you can grow into your passion, right. You can discover that at a later time. But you need to find a niche that makes sense and you need to Like if Splunk is your thing, study Splunk and that's it. Don't study anything else but Splunk so you can become the SME, the expert, and then you can make money like that, right, yeah.
Speaker 2:And if you study Splunk or any other type of SM now that I've seen, you may have to study like operating systems and some type of networking concepts, cause it's if you're going to be like an architect, an infrastructure person, for that you'll need to know that part. But that's related to what you want to do. I've made two couple of videos about quitting jobs. B's just recently made one about quitting her job. I mean, when people see like the amount of money like you quit for it, they just like I would have stayed, but they don't understand how it feels to be miserable doing a job you don't want to do, right, and that's what I tell people. Okay, cool, you can get in for the money, but eventually you just go through the motions. You're going to be just like the adults we ran into when we were younger because they hated their job and I read you find a tech role you like that pays you what you want, versus doing something you don't like and be invisible.
Speaker 1:Exactly, Exactly, and I always. You know I'm starting to work with clients on exit strategy, so that's coming down the pipeline. You know what does exit strategy look like for people that's making all this money? Are you investing that money Like what's next? Because if you're working let's just say, all of these jobs that's not sustainable the rest of your life. You could do it for one year, two years, three years, maybe four years, but you're going to eventually get burnt out. You need to take that money, you need to invest it and you need to grow it like the people that are in those higher up positions.
Speaker 2:And even if you like, this ain't a financial advice. But if you get like either a trading account or like a Roth, you can just put it in a fund that's known to perform well over 10 years, like all the time, and you don't even have to worry about actually trading and you're going to see your money go up. Yeah, like it's a whole bunch of other stuff you can do. You can buy companies that are already working, you name it. But I really feel like we got to give y'all like a part two because I had the day started to and we'll figure out. Maybe the next time of being DC you know the new scenery and really get out there and do it. But I want to ask Marquesha if she wants to leave you guys with anything for this episode. Yeah, sure.
Speaker 1:So, once again, I'm so happy that you invited me to be on here and I'm happy that I ended up coming in person. If you all want to learn more about the career services that I offer the Achieve it Pathways program that has pre-launched since Friday If you want to learn more about the next things I have coming up, please reach out to me Once again. You can reach out to me at wwwyoutubecom. You can also text me or call me at 505-585-4194. I almost forgot the number. Or you can send an email at hello at you. Let her, you deserve it. Consultingcom, um. Best ways to find me. Also, I am on Twitter, so my Twitter is underscore MS and Mary S, as in Sam T, as in Tom R, as in Robert D, as in dog O, as in octopus M, as in Mary um, which actually stands for masterdom, because people always want to know what does my handle stand for? It's masterdom, which means ruler of all things. So yes, Um, but if there's anything else I want to leave you all with, I was just telling my Uber driver. She said what's the best advice you've ever been given? And I said the best advice I've ever been given is that you cannot be successful on your own. You need to collaborate with other people and you need to partner with other people, and sometimes I get that you want to do it on your own because you feel that you know the best way to go about it, but there's people that are smarter than you and there's people that you can learn from. And if you look around and you see people that are in higher places, like Elon Musk, jeff Bezos, all of those individuals right, they didn't do it alone. They were doing it with other people, people that they could bounce ideas off of. So if that's one thing I want to leave you with, it's look around in your circle, and if you can't collaborate with the people that are around you, then you need to surround yourself with better people. You need to surround yourself with people that are actually going to motivate you and to pour into you and get you to where you want to get to, because life is too short to be wasting it on people that are going nowhere. So, yeah, cool.
Speaker 2:And it was funny when you was giving your number I thought you was going to give him the Mike Jones number. It's just been another episode of the Texas Talk podcast. I really got really hope you guys enjoyed it. Also, this will be up early on the Patreon, so make sure you subscribe to the Patreon. Subscribe to the channel. We need a consultation. The links will be in the description, All her links will be in the description and until next time let's stay textual. And we out and we out. Peace.
