Episode Transcript

Sean Sebring:

Welcome to SolarWinds TechPod. I’m your host, Sean Sebring, and with me as always is my brilliant co-host, Chrystal Taylor. In this episode, we’ll discuss transition, transferable skills and tactical approach. We’ll be talking with SolarWinds Director of Marketing of Corporate Communications, Dillon Townsel, about his journey both to and from military to civilian work. Dillon, please give us a brief introduction of yourself.

Dillon Townsel:

Hi everyone. I’m Dillon Townsel, the Director of Communications here at SolarWinds, and I’m responsible for public relations, analyst relations, internal communications, social media, and anything else that requires the company to speak in a meaningful way about any topic that comes across my desk. I live in Austin, Texas and I have twin boys that are turning eight years old this weekend. So I like teaching them music, teaching them new things and experiencing soccer games, soccer coaching, and all of the stuff that comes with raising two crazy sons.

Sean Sebring:

That’s awesome. Yeah. I’d heard you had two twin boys and I can only imagine it’s double the trouble and also double the fun at the same time, so that’s great to hear, Dillon. To get us started, why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you started. And of course we’re taking this from the approach of some of the transition to and from. So how did you start moving from school to the military or was there anything before that and then of course moving out?

Dillon Townsel:

Yeah. My career path didn’t make sense to anyone, especially me. And in the end it all comes together. But I started off out of high school. I was a musician and I decided that I wanted to work in the music industry and I was in LA and so my first job was starting a recording studio. And the part that I loved about that was I loved writing my own music and I loved telling that story for myself, but then being able to help other people tell their story through music and create something that didn’t exist before, that was very appealing to me. And so I took my passion and ran with the chance that most people don’t get, and that’s to do something that you’re very passionate about as your first job. And so from the start, I knew that I wanted to follow things that excited me. I wanted to have jobs that were meaningful to me and things that interested me at the time.

Dillon Townsel:

And so wherever my career took me, it was with that in mind, following some passion of mine and being curious about something. And the passion and the curiosity you’ll see are the threads of my career. But it led me down some different paths because after three years of working in a recording studio, my business partner and best friend that I was in the venture with passed away. And so I was looking at continuing on by myself or switching careers, and I opted to switch careers. I went to work for Fry’s Electronics who some of the older folks may remember being incredibly popular on the West Coast.

Sean Sebring:

Hey, now, hey, now you don’t have to be that old to know Fry’s and love Fry’s.

Dillon Townsel:

Fry’s went away a few years ago, I think. We’re talking like early 2000s era. So they were wildly popular in California and the southwest and they were starting to branch out. And so I worked in their LA location in Burbank and they had said they were opening a new store in Illinois. And so I raised my hand, decided I wanted a change to get out of LA. I went to Downers Grove, a little suburb of Chicago and opened this huge store. I was a salesperson at the time, and this was my first taste at leading a team. They asked me if I wanted to be a supervisor of this management team and mentor other salespeople. I said, “Sure. Why not? It’s a pay increase. I’ll take it.” Found out that I really liked running teams. I went from having a small team of five to seven to managing the department and having 65 commissioned sales employees doing all the marketing and all of the merchandising of the department, and then adjusting for sales quotas and everything along the quarter and being on the sales floor and encouraging people and taking sales away from my salespeople if they got lazy.

Dillon Townsel:

And so it was this very involved player-coach style of management that I learned early on and I found out that I loved team building. I love that aspect of it. I found out also that I hated retail sales and working those hours. It’s murder. I did that from probably the age of 21 to 25. I left the computer sales industry and did women’s designer shoes for a bit. I did diamond rings, engagement rings and high-end watches trying to see if it was just that part of retail sales that I hated. But I found out that no, I actually liked technology. I liked working with tech more than selling high-end watches or shoes or whatever. And so figured that out, but then decided sales was probably not for me. So onto the next thing.

Dillon Townsel:

Age 25 I lost my mind and I joined the military. This was something where I felt like at age 25, I was stuck in a rut. I had done my passion project, I’d created this recording studio and done that and then switched it entirely and gone to learn a new discipline. And I felt that I needed to shake things up. I wanted to travel, I wanted to see the world, I wanted someone else to pay for my education because that’s expensive. And so all of those things to me screamed military. I went to the Air Force because I was told that that was the place to go, and I wanted to meet with them on a Saturday and the Air Force didn’t show up on a Saturday. And the army guys who were working on a Saturday were kind enough to invite me into the air conditioning. And that was one of the bigger mistakes in my life was getting sucked into joining the army that day.

Dillon Townsel:

But the best decision I made that day was to switch from going into military intelligence, which is where I thought the action was. That’s what I thought would intrigue me. I grew up as a kid on spy movies, watching all the espionage and all the cool stuff and thought, oh, I want to work with spy satellites one day and work on that cool stuff. And then I found out that that job is actually quite boring. It’s a lot of analysis and a lot of just the same thing over and over again. They also had a shortage of combat journalists at the time. They required someone who had a non-regional dialect. So I did not tell them that I grew up in Alabama because I could speak like someone who came from California and they never questioned that I ever had a southern accent. But the bonus was much higher for combat journalists so I was sold. I was like, okay, I can still see the world. I can still do this cool job. It was pitched to me like you can be a radio DJ or you can be a television anchor, whatever. So very exciting opportunities.

Dillon Townsel:

Of course they lied and no one gets to do that stuff. Those are the top-level positions you get in the field. And then I got assigned to go to Fort Hood in Texas, and I was going through defense information school and ended up getting my orders switched to go to Egypt as a radio DJ. So landed in my lap that I got to do the actual job that I signed up to do. Very cool year in Egypt. This is back in 2009, 2010 and before Arab Spring and things were quite peaceful in the desert. So it was just me broadcasting a few hours a day doing local news and playing requests on the radio and doing command information and basically doing internal comms for the base. And along the way, I started doing my undergrad. I started in computer science and doing my stuff from Egypt online. And the unit found out that I was a techie and they asked me to take on the secondary job of network security manager. So I did that to support the base because we were short-staffed and everyone needed a second job.

Sean Sebring:

And shameless plug, how did you do that?

Dillon Townsel:

Well, I took a lot of courses. I took a lot of courses at the DOD one of which was when I left Egypt that I went to Afghanistan with my new unit, I was in a tent in Afghanistan my second week of deployment, and they sat me down for a 40-hour course and it was a contractor introducing us to SolarWinds. And that was my first ever exposure to SolarWinds, it was a crash course for a week in a tent in Afghanistan getting certified on it and then using it on the classified and unclassified networks there. And so for the last four years of my military career, the last of the five or four of the five, I was basically a network security engineer for half the job, I was combat reporter and network security engineer. And so those two things lived side by side in my mind because the duties were always there for both.

Dillon Townsel:

And so I did a year in Afghanistan, had some close calls. I was very lucky. I was around people that weren’t so lucky and part of my duties there included doing some of the memorial work on that side of people who were killed in action or wounded and then giving that footage over to their families for closure, things like that. And so I saw the good parts and the bad parts of the military I would say, but five years was enough. And when I looked at getting out my actual job on paper was journalist. And so I immediately looked to do I want to be a reporter? Do I want to work in technology as a consumer tech reporter or enterprise tech reporter? That didn’t sound that appealing to me. I liked some of the storytelling aspects of being a reporter, but I didn’t like the idea of working in a newsroom or doing anything like that. And then I had the tech side of my brain where I had been trained in all this network security content and I’ve been practicing it for years, but I didn’t really like working on the tech. I liked learning about the tech. I liked explaining the tech and helping people understand how to use the tech in a meaningful way.

Dillon Townsel:

And so as I was getting out, I realized, well, I can take these two things and blend them. And in between journalism and network security, there was this wide open space of doing tech PR. And so I switched careers a little bit. I blended the two halves in a way that made sense to me, and that was my career transition. Now I’ll say the military does a scattershot job of preparing people for transition. And depending on your MOS, depending on your job … Your MOS is your military occupational specialty. But depending on what your job is, some are transferable and some are not. The trick to transitioning is to apply the things that your job has taught you, the education you’ve received, all the training that the military has given you, and convert that to usable civilian skills. And for a lot of people, that’s hard in the military because there’s not really a need to stack artillery shells in a certain way so they don’t roll down a hill or dial in coordinates on a strike in your office.

Chrystal Taylor:

But you worked well under pressure. That looks good on a resume.

Dillon Townsel:

Working good under pressure is definitely one. I remember as I was doing the transition, as I was interviewing before I ever got out of the military, I started the process and I had an interviewer asked me how I react under pressure, and I thought … We had just finished me telling her about being deployed to Afghanistan, and she asked me how I handle pressure. And I thought for a second my smart ass response was, well, is anyone shooting in the office? Then I’ll be fine. And so she laughed and we’re still friends on Facebook and we still talk about it. And she said that was the dumbest question she’s ever asked in an interview. But I was like, “Yeah, that is something that a lot of people forget.” That you are very good in the crisis. You are very good at looking at structure and doing things that are repeatable processes. That is something that is drilled into your mind in the military and it’s something that you look for. Most people who come out of the military tend to have a little bit more structure in their lives. They carry themselves differently, they dress differently, they eat differently. So the manner of speech is even different after they come out of the military.

Dillon Townsel:

And so it’s finding the things that are transferable and that work for you without making people feel weird. And there definitely was part of that as well. The transition is not just about translating your career, it’s about adjusting your reactions to your environment and applying your experiences. Because my communication style with everyone at my first job was tense, very short. It was very direct and to-the-point, and my boss was incredibly effective, but people are a little scared. You’re freaking people out a little bit because there’s no fluff, there’s no filler. You’re just telling them exactly what needs to be done and the deadline and how to get there. And that was probably great for the military. So there was an adjustment and I was ostensibly a communicator. Someone who was good at this field, and I was talking to people like they were in my unit and I was going to make them do pushups if they didn’t meet the deadline. And so it did take a minute for that switch to flip in my head.

Chrystal Taylor:

Unfortunately in the regular civilian life, you can’t just make people go do pushups when they don’t do what you want.

Dillon Townsel:

No. I do it with my kids. I punish them with pushups all the time. But no, unfortunately you can’t do that at work.

Chrystal Taylor:

Yeah. That was a lot by the way. You have done so much. I think that the largest thing that I’m going to take out of that is in a way it’s very inspiring to know that you can just switch what you’re doing. I don’t have passion for this anymore. I’m going to go learn something else. I’m going to go do something else. And talking to someone who has done that … I talk about it all the time, but more specifically within the field of technology of if I don’t like this piece of technology anymore or I’m not getting any enjoyment out of supporting it or whatever, that now I can just … There’s more technology, there’s always more technology. Go learn a different piece. And I think that’s really interesting. This is a whole wider perspective of not just within technology, but we see people all the time that are transitioning from other careers, teachers, truck drivers, whatever, into technology, and it just goes to show you that there is nothing to hold you back. If that’s what you want to do, go learn and do it. Take the drive and go do those things.

Chrystal Taylor:

You mentioned a lot of things in there that were really interesting. All the way back to the beginning of starting, you’ve been working with some form of technology for a very long time, which is very interesting and normal I think nowadays. Talking to someone in Gen Z now, which none of us are by the way, if anyone who doesn’t know who we are. None of us are Gen Z. Those people don’t know how to do a lot of things without technology. We grew up in a inbetween phase where we had to learn how to use all of the technology order to be successful, and that now is so inherent that a baby will use an iPhone. It’s just we’ve evolved as humans to require technology. So it’s fun to talk about going through that whole process and taking the time to learn and transition from different roles into the military, which is a transition all its own and then back out of the military to civilian life.

Chrystal Taylor:

I latched onto some of the things that you were saying there about how difficult it is to reorient yourself because it is a very different world in the military. They speak differently, they react differently. They are different things that are considered acceptable than are considered acceptable in civilian life, like requiring someone to do pushups for instance when they don’t do what you want. And I experienced this tertiary through my ex-husband when he transitioned out of the military and it was a big challenge. So it’s nice to meet someone who’s so well-rounded after all of that. It’s hard to recover from those things. It’s hard to recover from being in combat or from being near people. I can’t imagine trying to recover from having to do memorial videos for soldiers while you were deployed. That seems like a whole different level of challenge.

Dillon Townsel:

Yeah. I think the one unique thing about my military experience was just my age going in and a lot of people who joined the military are 18, 19 years old. I was 25, and so I was on my third career, I guess third phase of my career by that point. Did the recording studio, did the sales management and so I was a grizzled old 25-year-old joining the military when I was surrounded by people who were high school seniors the week before. And so just walking in, I had a few years of maturity on folks. I already had the leadership experience from the Fry’s Electronics time, and then I wasn’t brought up in the military leadership culture. So someone who was 25 in the military has probably been in for seven years and they’re probably very set in their ways and they were taught leadership principles by the military, and I’d already been taught how to manage people outside of that. It’s still a high pressure environment being in sales, but very different, a very different mentality. You’re chasing the money, right? You’re trying to make a sale or you’re trying to mentor people on the fly. You’re all working for a common goal and it’s not life or death.

Dillon Townsel:

And then when it is life or death, you obviously have to adjust how you’re working with people and how you’re running a team because the stakes are higher. But there are things that you can also bring from your previous life, your previous civilian management and be something different that the military is not used to. And so I was working in a very specialized field in the military. There are actually less military journalists than are military chaplains. That’s how few of them there are across the armed services. And so a small group of people, I know all the people that I came up with and people that trained me are now working in corporate communications elsewhere. And so it’s a small field. But the thing that I saw was in this small group, there were a lot of high functioning people who they were actually very portable to the civilian world because they were used to communicating. They were used to dealing with both civilian and military folks while they were in the military because they had to work with journalists and people who were coming to their areas or work with local news outlets around their base or whatever. And so a lot of them made that jump rather easily.

Dillon Townsel:

I think between the age and then having the public affairs training that we did and working with all different kinds of groups in the military, that made my transition easier than most. And so I’m glad that it was easy for me. I’m fully aware that it’s not for a lot of people. But the thing that I’ve seen though on people who do transition successfully is number one, like I said, finding those things that convert from your military experience into civilian skills that are transferable somewhat, but also you don’t have to do the exact same thing. There are variations on a theme. I tweaked mine to make it fit what I wanted to do, what I thought would make me happy. And I think that there’s an opportunity for a lot of different people in the military to do the same thing and take the elements of the military experience they didn’t like and leave those in the past, which hopefully they can. But then also take parts that they did like about it and move forward.

Dillon Townsel:

And leadership obviously is one that most people will experience in the military in some sort. They’ll come out with more management confidence and experience. But also just there’s so many weird little things in the military that you experience that you don’t get anywhere else. And if you can find ways to take some of those skills with you, it helps make it all make sense. Like I said at the beginning, my story didn’t make sense as I was doing it. If I’m looking back in hindsight, I started a couple of months ago at SolarWinds and during the interview process I told them that story about the tent and my first exposure to SolarWinds. And that was the story that stuck with them, I think, and the story that probably got me hired at SolarWinds because I stuck out in their mind as that candidate who not only used the software and had hands-on experience, but had this weird inflection point in his life where he was never going to forget the moment he was exposed to SolarWinds. And then by extension they’re never going to forget that story. And so that’s the storytelling element that I carried with me. I wanted to tell stories of musicians. I wanted to tell my own, and then I learned how to tell stories with other people through helping them record their music.

Dillon Townsel:

I got to sales and I learned how to tell a story to get someone to convert to buying a laptop and buy an extended warranty and how to talk someone through all the pain points of spending two grand on a laptop they probably don’t need. But that’s storytelling in a different way. And then in the military, just going right to it and being a journalist and getting trained on all the audio and video editing and structuring a story, scripting it out. I would get off a helicopter, go meet some people, record a story, upload it to a satellite and be off to the next place within 24 hours. And so I had to go in, make friends, find the story, dig it out of them, put it together in a video, and then edit that in Adobe Premiere and then upload it through a portable satellite and then figure out what I was going to do the day after.

Dillon Townsel:

And so that was the kind of storytelling that I was used to and that’s what I was trained to do was that rapid drop in, do the story, pull out, go do it again over and over and over again. And so that was the part that I really liked. That was the part that excited me because people look around, there’s a hundred people on this base in the middle of nowhere in Afghanistan, and they’re like, they know everyone. But then I come in and I start asking questions, did you guys know that this guy does actually some very cool stuff. He’s the food inspector and the animal inspector, so he has his hands in mashed potatoes in the morning and the hand in a goat later today. Did you guys know that about his job? And people are like, “What?” Yeah. There’s a cool story about this guy that you’ve known him for a year. So helping people tell those stories and make the military more interesting and pull those things out. Whatever I was going to do next, had to have some element of that because that was my favorite part of the job.

Dillon Townsel:

And so I was lucky enough to pull some strings together from various careers in my life and find something that worked. And along the way, I started off doing a lot of the storytelling and PR and writing stuff, and now I’m more on the advising and consultant side and helping people strategize how to do it, but the storytelling element is still there. And helping the team learn how to find those stories is one of the most important parts of my job now. It’s stoking that passion and curiosity in other people and helping them become effective storytellers.

Sean Sebring:

I love that we’re talking about it as storytelling because that’s a lot of what I like to do as well. It’s easier to understand a story than it is just to spit facts. So I would say from what I heard … And I want you to correct me if I’m wrong here. But the number one skill that has been expressed here is communication. You talked about it and everything, and in fact, of course, it’s the element of storytelling is being able to communicate this story. But then another piece that you’ve mentioned which I think is important to highlight is I would say adaptability, but it’s not always you being able to adapt, but adapting what you want to make, what you want happen. Just to expand on what I heard was you said, “Well, I have skills. Let me adapt them to do something that I want.”

Sean Sebring:

You said, “I like this element of storytelling, rapid storytelling. Being able to convey here’s what I learned, here’s what I gathered.” And even bringing people together in a way too. The way you were talking about telling, “Hey, did you know this guy?” But of course communication is super necessary, but that’s probably what you had mentioned was one of the most important skills that help folks be successful. But then the other one I think is really cool and I think is a really powerful message is you don’t have to just take the skill you had there and say this is all I can do when I leave. Instead say, what did I like or what do I like and how can I use the skills I learned to make that possible?

Dillon Townsel:

Yeah. I went through the Army transition programs. Like a guidance counselor-esque procedure as you’re going through this. So if any of you ever had a guidance counselor in high school, they sit you down, they talk to you, they find out what you like and what you don’t like, and they make recommendations based on what they think you’d be good at in your college or your career.

Dillon Townsel:

And so similar thing in the military, as you’re getting ready to leave about six months out, they’ll do the same type of thing. It’s like you’re graduating high school all over again and they’ll ask you, what do you like about your job? What field are you thinking about going into? Do you have a degree? Are you planning on getting a degree? And so they’ll figure out where to guide you. And my meeting was awkward. I was like, I have no idea what I want to do. And then they started asking questions. And I said, “Well, I don’t like this. I don’t like that. What do you like?” So I didn’t give them an answer. I didn’t figure it out right then, but it got me in the mindset of trying to pull those things together. At least it sparked the conversation with myself of what do you want out of your military career? What would make it worthwhile for this five years to not have been a total waste? Because if I switched into something that didn’t relate to my military experience and started over from scratch, then what was I getting other than a college education and some travel and some fun stories? So I needed it to make sense. I wanted it to be a cohesive part of my experience.

Dillon Townsel:

And so I started thinking like, okay, you like telling stories, you like explaining things to people or helping people explain things that are incredibly complex situations, whether it’s technical or geopolitical or whatever. You like that aspect of complexity-to-simple. So why not do it for tech? Tech is some of the driest communications territory there is. Everyone’s product and solution based. We are always all of us looking for ways to make our jobs more appealing and more interesting to everyone around us and to explain to people why we think our jobs are interesting and appealing because we can nerd out on this stuff all day long, but to our families, most of the time we are extended tech support.

Sean Sebring:

I just think of Peanuts.

Dillon Townsel:

I’m sure all of us have been like, “Hey, is this a phishing email?” Your family sends you that at 9:00 at night? Don’t click on it, Mom. But that’s what we’ve gone to. We can’t tell our stories very well to people because we feel like it’s so complex. We feel like this landscape is so dense and so technical that no one’s going to understand it. And the challenge of that appealed to me and I wanted to dive in and say, okay, let’s take some of this crazy stuff like cybersecurity. And at the time, this was 2012, 2013, when I was making the transition. Cybersecurity was on the scene. Everyone wanted to talk about it, spend money on it, blow up their budgets with it, but no one really knew how to talk about it in a meaningful way. There was a lot of reactionary garbage out there and not a lot of true thought leadership. And so that was one of the first areas where I looked into what was possible and thought, okay, this could be fun. Let me take these two things that I enjoy and run down the middle where very few people have even started going yet. And then let’s enter this cybersecurity PR landscape and see what happens.

Sean Sebring:

Well, to your point, you mentioned cybersecurity had a need. It was important. It was getting a lot of attention. But I think the storytelling for you, especially in this specific story is that why. And storytelling is that. It’s answering the question why? Because you can say in facts or you can say in statistics, but telling the story of why being able to effectively communicate that did definitely have such a big need.

Sean Sebring:

So Dillon, what would you say … In that transition you did a good job of having some skills you brought with you and you took the right passion and saying, this is where I want to go. But after you exited the military and started to head towards the cybersecurity world, what tools did you use? How did you expand your I guess, credentials after the military?

Dillon Townsel:

Good question. So I looked at doing things like actual network certifications, like CISSP and things like that that would give me more legitimacy. I had done some A plus, network plus, security plus stuff while I was in the military, but the military didn’t really require civilian certifications the way that most companies do because you’re on proprietary tools most of the time so it doesn’t matter. When I first got out, I thought that’s where I needed to be. I thought if I’m going to be taken seriously, when I was talking to CIOs, CISOs, engineers and developers, I need to have some of the same letters after my name as they do. And then I quickly realized that they didn’t care. Some of them didn’t care about having those credentials, and some of them thought the credentials were pointless to have anyway. And so what worked best for me was introducing myself like, “Yes, I realized that I’m coming from marketing, but I need you to understand that I started off on your side. I came from this world and go ahead and talk to me like you would a peer, like someone that you’re briefing on a team on a project just on a normal day, and if I get over my head, I’ll stop you and let’s start there and see where we go.”

Dillon Townsel:

And so it helped me just to reset with people. And this was also part of my training of going in and finding stories. I needed to talk to those people who were so deep in the weeds with the technology, they were unaware of what stories they were sitting on, and the only way to do that was to have a conversation with them at a technical level and then start pulling it back towards the broader audience. And so that’s where I found my sweet spot. It was being able to speak the language of the people who were most intimately involved in developing the technology, proving it, whatever, that were tied to the customers and then bringing that out to make it make sense for everyone else.

Sean Sebring:

One thing you said, Dillon, though, I want to expand on it because you said that when you were interviewing or trying to show who you were, you were almost disassociating with, I’m not just this guy that was from the military, I know where you were, I’ve been there, I’ve done these things. Did I hear that right?

Dillon Townsel:

Yeah. I wanted them to understand that I came from a place of being an actual user. That to me is important in my job because people look at the PR person and they’re like, “Okay. You don’t know anything about our product or solutions. Yeah. Sure, you write press releases, but what do you actually know about the inner workings of tech?” And so being able to flip that and come at them as not an equal, but at least someone who is conversant enough to follow along and be able to ask questions and guide the conversation a bit, that helped me start pulling out stories and finding those threads with people. But it also helped me earn their trust quickly, which is very important. If you’re a communicator or a reporter or any person who’s trying to tell a story and elicit responses from someone or emotional response from someone, you have to earn their trust.

Dillon Townsel:

And so speaking the common language of technology and code and everything, that certainly helped, but then it was also helping them see the value of their story. Do you realize what you did saved 3000 hours for someone this week? Across their company you saved them this much time. Do you want to tell that story with me? And then you see them go, oh my God, okay, yeah, sure, let’s do it. That was the exciting part for me. It was finding the story, elevating the story, and then ultimately everyone loves seeing the coverage from the story, getting that out in the open. Finding something that no one’s even thought was there and showing it to everyone possible. That’s the exciting part. That’s why I love working in comms. That’s the reason I get up and do this every day.

Chrystal Taylor:

You said something that I think is really important to maybe see if you have any advice on which is that that drive to figure out what you can transition your skills to or what you even want to do that’s maybe not just the military. A lot of people in the military tend to get stuck in that trap of thinking that this is all that they know how to do. And it’s not just the military, it happens other places as well, but it’s really prevalent in the military, especially if they’re in a combat MOS where they get stuck and they think, “All I can go do is security or something like that.” But if they were interested in transitioning into technology, do you have any advice for them on how to get going down the track, how to ask themselves the right questions to get their brains thinking about what would maybe they take those skills and turn those into something else? How can you go down that way?

Dillon Townsel:

Love this question, and it’s something that I saw in practice when I was at IBM years ago. And we were working with an ethical hacking team that was new to IBM and they were … It was IBM. IBM’s a massive company. Very bureaucratic. And the idea of having ethical hacking as part of their portfolio was terrifying to some of them. And so we were bringing people in and I was trying to tell their stories and as part of that, learning the backgrounds of these people who were coming into tech. And the assumption is that everyone has a master’s degree in network engineering and blah, blah, blah. And that’s just not the case. One of the best ethical hackers on the team, she was actually Air Force, but she was … I’m going to mess this up. But she was like the load master for airplanes. She did the load balancing and the weight distribution for a cargo plane and the loading in and out to make sure that nothing would disrupt in flight.

Dillon Townsel:

And so it was a lot of logistics and math involved. But she also started helping work with the engineers and she would mess with Raspberry Pis and Arduinos and stuff like that to come up these little devices around the shop that just made people’s lives easier or did these cool little things. And so people saw that she was doing that and then she ended up getting into a military working group where they were testing some portable devices like that, applications of those in the field. And she liked tinkering. She likes playing with new tech and breaking the rules of the military to see what was possible with civilian tech. And so she found ethical hacking that way.

Dillon Townsel:

She went from this very, very military job. How many people get to do that. There’s literally one job. You go work at an airport and you do cargo loads for an airport, that’s your job. So she was doing that and then found her passion and then ended up working for IBM security in this job that didn’t exist two years prior. She wanted to build ethical hacking devices that you could walk into and do a scan from someone’s network or someone’s conference room. You could plug into the network jack and do a scan of their entire org. And that was what she contributed to the ethical hacking team because she loved playing with Raspberry Pis. And that’s a cool story. You’re not going to find the word you’re looking for if you try to do a one-to-one conversion, you’re going to have to look around a little bit and you’re going to have to look outside of the military to help you. The transition materials, the programs they have are for the masses. They’re for everyone. They’re made to apply to hundreds of different jobs, hundreds of different skill levels and ranks. And so it’s not a one size fits all, and there’s not a lot of personalized attention on what your transition needs to look like coming out of the military.

Dillon Townsel:

So what I found worked for me was there multiple veterans organizations out there and finding one of them to help you with the transition, to help you with some planning to help you navigate the bureaucracies of things like VA disability for example. These organizations have a lot of practice in doing this, and my recommendation is to hook up with them before you even start the transition process. Before you ever decide if you’re going to re-enlist, or re-up your commission. Before you ever reach that point, start working with them because they’re going to tell you, you need to collect these certain things before you get out. You need to have all this documentation. You’re going to need this in five years, this in 10 years. This is going to come up when you file for disability, make sure you have this, this, this. Go ahead and write out this before you forget it. They’ll guide you through all of that, and they are very good at it.

Dillon Townsel:

The one that I found works for me was Disabled American Veterans, dav.org. They’re primarily focused on helping you do VA claims and mental health and doing all the things that go along with helping wounded warriors. But there are also a lot of career initiatives they have and a lot of other support that they provide the community because they’re good at what they do. So I would say take what the military has to offer in terms of transition materials, look at what they’ve got to provide and then figure out what the gaps are and then go find an organization that fits your needs. And beyond that, find a mentor. Find someone who’s actually made the transition before and has lived this. I am still in touch with a lot of people that were in while I was in. Some of them were my instructors when I went to Defense Information School back in 2007, -8. Some of these people were my instructors and they stayed in for 20 years and retired from the military after I got out of doing my five and I moved into the civilian career. And some of the people who were my instructors would come back and ask me like, “Hey, you did the transition into civilian career pretty smoothly. Do you have an hour where we can just talk about what you did?”

Dillon Townsel:

I remember that happening back in 2014, 2015 for the first time, and I’d only been out of the military for a few years. I was still relatively junior in my civilian career working in the PR agency. And one of my oldest instructors who taught me public affairs and broadcast journalism was like, “Hey, can you help me with my transition?” I’m like, “Absolutely.” And now he’s a communications manager for a large city and so he’s doing great. But it’s reaching out to people who have done it and not necessarily someone who’s older than you or wiser than you, but someone who’s just been through it and can help you address all of the things you haven’t thought about. There are things that you have to plan for before you get out and there are things that you will have to stay on top of. It’s an ongoing thing, keeping up with your post-military career.

Sean Sebring:

I like that. The mentor thing is huge. I’m a big supporter of finding mentors. I always try to have one. But the humility aspect you spoke of is also important. Don’t worry about if they’re older, if they’re wiser, if they’re younger. That’s not important to it. And just like with the resources you mentioned, it’s good and it’s okay to find out any resource at your fingertips. There’s no pride or shame involved with saying, “Hey, what would make me better?” That’s the angle you should come at it with. Not just, I need help. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s looking at resources as a way to just boost yourself. So I love the mentor idea and I just want to echo that that’s an awesome thing, and I’m glad to hear you say that, Dillon.

Dillon Townsel:

I will say that one of the things that can be challenging … I saw it in myself and I’ve seen it with some other people. As you’re making the transition, it is hard to ask for help sometimes. It is hard to reach out and say that you don’t know something or that you’re not equipped to do something because if you spend a few years in the military, that is very much drilled out of you and you’re taught that you’re trained, and so you’re capable. And so then given all the information, you practice this, you can do this, and then you’re left to execute. And so being in a position where you have to say, I don’t know how to do something, is not a comfortable place for people who are in the military. It’s not. Vulnerability is not a skill the military puts a lot of emphasis on.

Chrystal Taylor:

Oh no. They put a lot of emphasis on getting rid of that.

Dillon Townsel:

They do. They do. They drill it out of you every chance they get. And so switching that over in your mind to say, I don’t know everything about being a civilian. I was before. I spent years as a civilian before I went into the military. I knew what it was like to rent, pay bills, take care of my own health insurance, all that stuff. But some people coming out of the military have never done that for themselves because everything is insular. It’s all taken care of. And so they’re coming out of the military and they’re like, “Oh my God, I have to worry about booking my own doctor’s appointments and stuff? It’s not just done for me automatically?” And so there are a lot of things that you just don’t think of, and it’s not a comfortable place to live when you’ve lived in such a structured environment for years of your life and everything’s been dictated and controlled and very, very structured around you to go back into freeform civilian life. It can freak people out.

Dillon Townsel:

But also a lot of people just don’t know what to expect. And so having someone who’s made the transition, not only from a career perspective, but just like a purely mental health perspective, that can be huge. I’ve been there for a few people that are close to me through that process before, and I’ve seen it’s incredibly valuable. So I would say people who are veterans, that’s one way that you can help people in the transition is just being aware of when their time’s coming up. Like six to eight months out and just saying, “Hey, I remember going through this seven years ago. I know it was a crazy time. I’m here for whatever you want to talk about.” Something as simple as that can be enough for them to overcome that, I have to know everything. I have to be able to be self-sufficient. I have to be the tough soldier or whatever. That alone could get them thinking about, oh, okay, maybe it’s time to not be in the uniform and it can be a little bit more human now.

Chrystal Taylor:

I think from an outsider’s perspective, one of the best things that I’ve seen come out of the military is this sense of connection that you get with people in the military. It doesn’t even matter if they were in your unit. Obviously the connection is way stronger if you worked with them on a day-to-day basis. But I have seen it time and time again where if you just get the confidence or the courage to talk to someone, it doesn’t matter if you even met them before. I’ve seen my brother … My brother was a Marine and he’s been out for a few years now, and he helps people all the time. Other people he meets and they’re like, “Oh, my son’s transitioning out of the military,” or something like that. This happens all the time, and he’s always willing to help. So I would just echo that, that sense of connection that you got in the military that you’re probably never going to find again.

Chrystal Taylor:

It is not the same anywhere else. You’re not going to ever be in … Most likely. Let’s hope for you, you’re never going to be in those live or die situations with other people, and so no one’s going to quite understand those things and be on that level with you. So if you just have the confidence or the courage, just work it up a little bit to ask for that help, I think that you’ll be in a much better situation than you ever could have been trying to do it on your own. You want to do it by yourself because that’s the thing they teach you. To do it by yourself. But as Sean said, you are never trained. And for a lot of these people, because they went directly right out of high school living with your parents into the military, maybe you don’t have those life skills. We make a lot of fun in social media and stuff like that of these people with their hashtag adulting or whatever, they’re just doing regular life skills. But at the same time, if no one ever taught you those regular life skills, why should there be any expectation to know?

Dillon Townsel:

Yeah. There’s a lot that’s interesting about transitioning out of the military. But I would say to your point about the bonding and the rivalry, everyone in the Army and the Marines, there’s a lot of rivalry that goes back and forth. But one of the nice things is once you transition out of the military, your community of veterans grows a little bit. You’re very insular to your own branch while you’re in because there is that inherent rivalry with everyone. It’s always there. When you get out it is more like a shared experience and less like a rivalry. I think in the US it’s maybe less than 1% of the population has actually served in the military. And so your pool of people who can relate is smaller. And so you’re not going to exclude the Marines just because they’re Marines. So your pool gets a little bit bigger. It’s the shared experience of being a veteran or being a combat veteran or whatever it is for you.

Dillon Townsel:

So I think if you’re looking for a mentor as you’re getting out, don’t be afraid to go across the branch lines, so to speak, and find someone who may have worked in a different field or a different branch of service and see what their experience is like. Because a lot of this stuff is common. It doesn’t matter what branch you’re in. A lot of the processes in the military at the same, a lot of the experiences are very close. Also, the Air Force has nicer barracks and food in general, but for the most part, it’s a pretty common experience across all the branches. But yeah, it’s one of those things where … I went to Defense Informational School, my military training was with all branches. It was Air Force, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, Army, everyone, and I started out Space Force. But we had a rivalry, but we also had to work together because it was such a small group of people across all the branches. There were very few of us. And we knew that we were going to be working with one another throughout our entire careers, and then probably working together once we got out of the military as well, because where else were we going to land other than communications or journalism?

Dillon Townsel:

And so there was a built-in bond already of being in the military, being in the small field within the military, and then working on this very cool part of the military, which was getting to see everyone else’s jobs and everyone else’s experiences, and then telling them to civilians. And that was a great way to bond. I wish more branches of the military had that. I feel like that was probably unique in a lot of ways. But I guess my takeaway from that is find the connection wherever you can. You’re going to need some support in that when you get out and however way that manifests in your military experience and translates to your civilian career and life, find it and don’t let it go.

Dillon Townsel:

You’re going to need support. You’re going to need guidance. You’re going to need other organizations to help you navigate things, and you’re going to have to ask for help, and it’s going to be uncomfortable. But in the long run, being in the military makes you incredibly strong and gives you a lot of skills that most people never have the chance to even develop or think about developing. So there’s a lot of mental toughness that I think can get in your way, but it also, once you have a direction and once you have some guidance, it makes it very easy to actually follow through and get things done because you’re trained to do that. That’s the skill you do have. Asking for help is the hard part. Getting it done, that’s the easy part.

Sean Sebring:

Man, what a perfect way to wrap this segment, Dillon. And thank you for sharing such a cool story and really valuable insights both for non-military, so as civilians to get some good perspective, and I’m sure to veterans who could take away great value from that. Also, thank you to Chrystal as always for keeping this engaging and entertaining. But Dillon, I just want to say thank you one more time for joining us.

Dillon Townsel:

Thank you so much for having me. This was a blast. And I think we’re putting my LinkedIn information in the notes for this, so if there are any military folks who are transitioning or thinking about whether or not they’re going to reenlist and they are interested in how to effectively manage your transition to civilian career, please reach out to me. It’s one of the things that … I am involved in veterans groups. I’ve done some activities before, but doing it personally with people is way more meaningful and being able to help someone through that is something that I’ve done and I love doing. So feel free to reach out to me. Or if you’ve recently gone through it and still have questions about the process. It’s a years-long thing. I don’t want people to feel like the transition is the end. It’s just the beginning, and you’re going to find out a lot of things along the way that you’d wish you’d known so find some other people who’ve done it. Don’t be afraid to reach out.

Sean Sebring:

Lastly, thank you to all of our listeners for joining us. If you haven’t yet, make sure to subscribe and follow for more TechPod content. Thanks for tuning in.