After returning from serving in Afghanistan, Sydney-based Tom Moore founded a company that aims to change the way the veteran workforce is perceived by industry and upskill ex-military personnel for a career in technology.
Moore spent seven and a half years in the Australian infantry. He led a 60-man team into combat in Afghanistan in 2013 and thought it would be his sole career for the rest of his life, however, Moore was injured later that year, which meant he had to return to Australia and face the standard day-to-day life. It also meant he had to find a new job.
Moore built a software app to store the contact details of CEOs. All of a sudden, the game changed and he was offered a handful of jobs. One of his first jobs entailed cold calling sales for HP, Lenovo, and Dell, and within 12 months he was consulting back to the head of channel.
Around that time, Moore’s soldiers began calling him, they were quite depressed, “they were unemployed or underemployed and I got jack of it, sold everything, and spent my AU$60,000 on building the software application to translate skills and experiences,” said Moore.
From there, Moore built out a mentoring, recruitment, and training program with the aim of helping employers realise their return on investment by targeting gaps in the labour market and matching veterans to those gaps. His startup, WithYouWithMe, also provides veterans with free training — validated by partners such as Amazon, BAE Systems, Accenture, SAP, and DXC Technology — to ensure they have the skills for tech-based jobs.
Although Moore didn’t have any tech experience before his service in Afghanistan, the skills he developed while serving proved to be invaluable in the IT world.
“In Afghanistan, when you’re managing 60 [people], when you’re in an environment you’re not explicitly trained for, you sort of have to learn, you have to do it. There’s a mission you have to achieve,” the now CEO explained. “We’re trained to win.”
However, to get veterans jobs, Moore realised he can’t play the game that the recruitment market does.
“We can’t just get veterans jobs, we have to be really good at recruiting and I guess our key disruptor in that space is by working with companies, identifying the perfect fit — which is what our software allows us to do — and then we actually train them for the gaps that they’re missing,” he said.
Veterans leave Moore’s service quite qualified; they come out with hacking foundations, basic to advanced knowledge of Red Hat Linux, and Python skills, as some examples.
The above article was sourced from TechRepublic. Read more here
