I am often asked by recruiters, peers, and friends what my ideal employer would look like. I thought about it a bit and thought I might as well share my criteria since I’m always looking out for it:
- An entrepreneur culture
- Growth-oriented – status quo is not satisfying. There needs to be hunger to grow and scale
- A customer-first focus – delivering value to customers in their journey with the belief the more successful the customer is, the more successful the company will be
- A team focus – desiring high functioning teams, not rockstars (other than me 🙂 ). Win as a team
- Agile and lean methodologies
- Early-stage to SMB – under 83 employees
- ‘Community Aware’ – appreciative of people giving back and flex time to accommodate occasional community activities. For example, I would like to pursue VB EMS which would mean an occasional late morning arrival.
- Non-age biased – I’m only old physically – In 2019 I’m doing projects with public/private cloud, voice apps, IoT, Video processing, and Machine learning. Not Cobol.
- A home for an extrovert. I enjoy presenting, evangelizing, and hosting events.
- Learning opportunities – I’m a voracious consumer of ebooks, white-papers, webinars, and certification/class time
- non-DOD. Been there, done that, moves way too slow. Unless your DOD project is modern and leading technology it’s probably not a good fit for me culturally.
While I do not possess any clearances currently, due to my community service with VB CERT, VB PD, Project Lifesaver, and VB EMS, I have been fingerprinted and background checked numerous times in the last 18 months (they aren’t allowed to share) so background checks are not an issue and I have stellar references available.
Of course, I would prefer to stay in Hampton Roads but south of the snow-line is getting more and more appealing.
