482 | Update: Are Remote Tech Careers Still Relevant in 2024? | Bradley Rice

0:00Hello and welcome to Chooseify. Today on the show, we have our good friend Bradley Rice back on the show. It's been quite a while since we last had him on to talk about Salesforce, transitioning to new careers, how to use LinkedIn to find the hidden job market, which we talked about on episode 379, which is incredibly interesting. And this is really the latest, ultimately the second installment of our update series. So I actually had a bunch of people email me. I think it was three in like a six day span where they basically paraphrased said, Hey, Brad, you haven't updated us in years on those Salesforce jobs or talent stacker that you talked about a lot a couple of years back.

0:43Is it still relevant in 2024? So I reached out to Bradley, who's a long time choose a by community member. And I said, Hey, you want to come back on? Let's talk about this. Is it relevant in 2024? for? Is Talent Stacker still working for people to get jobs? And I think this is, of course, but one way that people can transition from a current career into another career, potentially making more money. But what's cool is I think it seeds that mindset of, okay, how can I think about transitioning? Maybe I'm not happy where I am now. How can I think about moving? What are the steps that I could take?

1:21And I think that's what Bradley has done really, really well over his prior appearances. So I think this is going to be a fun update. And with that, welcome to ChooseFI.

1:37Bradley, welcome back to ChooseFI. It's good to see you, my friend. Man, it is great to be here. It's been a minute, so I'm excited to be back and get to hang out with you for a little bit. So thank you for having me on. Yeah, you bet, my friend. It has been a minute. And yeah, it's wild to think back to when we first met, which was at, I guess, Camp Phi Southeast so many years ago, at least six years. Was it January 2018, possibly? I think you're right. It's right in there somewhere, 2017, 2018, Camp Phi down in, what, Gainesville, Hawthorne area. And yeah, that was pretty incredible. You couldn't talk at all.

2:11Yeah, that was. Do you know I still have the after effects of losing my voice at that Camp Phi? Whenever I go to an event now and talk a lot, my voice is just on the cusp. I call it my voice being brittle. I don't know. So anyway, not all that interesting to the audience, but it's wild how that has really stuck with me all these years. But yeah, those live events, those in real life meetups, they just matter so much to our community. And I think that's just what's so cool is, yeah, we met you there. And then we had you on the podcast in episode 117 at basically the beginning of 2019. And you were at that point just at a don't mean just, but you're just a regular five community member, right?

2:55And then you were pursuing five. I think you were on the path to at that point, you were upskilling. And you were I think if memory serves, because it was so long ago, you were essentially transitioning into a career where you could use your Salesforce skills on the side and make a significant income without working 40 hours a week. Is my memory hold at all? Yeah, that's exactly right. I think the goal of the episode overall was that we were talking about more like a lifestyle design conversation. And it was about how you can use the skills you have today to work part-time and how you transition into having more of your time back.

3:31And the funny thing is, I was working part-time, still making six-figure income as a Salesforce professional. So no one really latched onto the, at least not that I'm aware of, latched onto the lifestyle design element. They were all like, what the heck is Salesforce? How do I do that thing? kind of buried the lead on, hey, guys, this is more of a Tim Ferriss for our work week kind of story, right? Yeah, it wasn't it wasn't so much about getting into Salesforce. It was more about, you know, taking your life and thinking more, you know, critically about how you intertwine your career into your life.

4:03And then it very, very quickly shifted to become how does a Salesforce thing go? And then I think one of the listeners created what is now the Salesforce for everyone Facebook group. And it went wild from there once we all got together. Yeah, that's so interesting. So it's funny how you just, you never know where your life is going to take you, right? You essentially were designing a four-hour workweek life where you could make a significant income. Again, it was, I think the title of that episode was making a case for part-time work. So it's so interesting that, yeah, that got put to the side because, oh, wow, this career that I'm interested in.

4:40And that's why you're back on the show today is we talked about Salesforce so many times, so many times here on the show. And we've talked about what I guess ultimately evolved from that episode, from maybe those early Facebook groups, which is this talent stacker career development program that you put together. And I mean, that turned into something really massive that has helped thousands of people transition into a new career. and you could have never envisioned that. I mean, literally the day we met you at that Camp Fi, right? Yeah, no, not even close. It was actually another Camp Fi a couple of years later.

5:19I was there. I did an, what do you know, another little talk about a case for part-time and thinking critically about your work. And what do you know, another Choose Fi listener comes along and they're like, man, this is really great information. You should somehow package this and educate the world on the Salesforce thing and how to use it to design a more intentional life. And I went home and I didn't really know what to do. And I hired an intern with my part-time income. I hired an intern and I was like, how do you create a course? Like, what are these platforms you create courses on? Because I wasn't really a big course taker.

5:50And yeah, long story short, got going on that, reconnected with you guys, Talent Stacker was born. And to your point, I knew I could help people get jobs because we'd been doing that inside of that Facebook group that had occurred from the first episode. And people were getting jobs. And I think it got up to about 60 individuals in that group. And there were only about 200 people. So about 60 of those individuals landed jobs. It was a huge percentage of the overall group. And we realized there's something here. And I was getting a lot of DMs and emails about, hey, how do I break into my first job?

6:25I'm struggling. I'm hitting these barriers and these kinds of things. And I realized I was like, man, there's definitely something we can do here. I'm not necessarily an expert on how to structure a scalable approach to educating individuals and training individuals. But what do you know when you put time and energy towards something, you figure out how to do it and you talk to the right people. And yeah, it became something really, really meaningful. And, you know, back then, I think that was late 2020 when we first launched the Talent Stacker program. And at the time, I was really, really proud of it.

6:55I thought it was incredible. And our first member who ever joined the program landed a job just 42 days later. So it was it was all going great. But now I look back, it's been three years now. And I look back and I go, man, that initial program was so embarrassing. Like, yeah, it worked, but it's so embarrassing compared to what we're looking at today. And again, to your point, never could have dreamed it up. Never thought it would be what it is today. I thought it'd be sort of a side project that we worked on, but it became a really meaningful thing in my life and a lot of people's lives. So very, very thankful for that.

7:24Yeah, that's incredible, man. Congratulations. Just huge congrats. It's wild when you think about how a passion for something and just this alchemy of knowledge and passion and genuinely believing you can help somebody can lead you to something remarkable that you just never could have envisioned in your life. And it's really a testament to the hard work and dedication that you and the whole team has put in there. It's wild. And I mean, I've had kind of a first row seat, I guess, of watching this because as a lot of people from following Choose a Vibe known, we have really truly partnered with you guys.

8:02And I know Jonathan, when he found out about Townsaker, I mean, he went all in. I think it's long catalog that Jonathan is very dubious at best of the value of a college degree. And I think it was not just that, not like a railing against the system for the sake of it, but this seems so needless. And I think for him, it was It was born from his own story, right? Of going to undergrad, of coming out of pharmacy school with$168 ,000 in student loan debt, taking years to pay it off. I mean, he was probably 12 years in at that point from the start of undergrad to paying off those loans. And I mean, that's a really long time.

8:44And what if you can shortcut it for people? And I think that was always our goal at Chooseify was to find a number of these programs that could really help people transition. And honestly, Bradley, I'm still on the lookout for them. You know, you know, especially how dubious I am of online programs of any type of program. And I was skeptical of talent stacker at the beginning. I mean, truly skeptical. I think that again, it's something well cataloged. Like I find in my own experience that most online courses are complete junk. They're a total waste of time. And it's just, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of time.

9:20And at the end you're like, well, damn, I could have figured that out. or that didn't even help me at all. But I have gotten so many emails from ChooseFI listeners over the years, basically saying like, hey, I took a leap and I joined TalentSec. I joined that free five-day challenge that you talked about. And one thing led to another. I joined the program. I paid for it. Again, I took the leap and now I got this job making$75 ,000. And I transitioned from a job I didn't like, or I love this job, but it didn't pay enough and I needed to transition. And it's just remarkable. So, I mean, I have come literally 180 degrees on this.

9:58Not that I was skeptical of you, obviously, but just in general. And so that is a very long way of saying like, man, it's just been cool to watch. It's just been really, really cool to see how many Choose a Vibe community members have benefited. So bravo to you and the team. Yeah, I appreciate that. And I think, too, your skepticism is not the wrong way to be. I mean, I'm still very skeptical of online programs, courses, going back to what you mentioned, college. I'm very skeptical about college programs, college courses, online programs, online courses. you have to be careful because they're a dime a dozen.

10:36And I think it's the most interesting thing is that if you don't know, you don't know, but there are ways to evaluate the quality of any online course. I don't care if you're interested in tech and Salesforce or Talent Stacker or some totally different skillset that you're trying to grow. You can vet and validate these online programs. And I always tell people you should absolutely look for testimonials. Those testimonials should absolutely reference that person's full name. If they're not willing to give a testimonial under their full name, then how much of a testimonial are they really willing to give?

11:07It's basically saying like, I'll give you a testimony, but I don't want anyone to know who I really am. So the thing about us and other great programs that I've seen, not in our space, but in other spaces is that when they have testimonies, a lot of times they'll have videos, sometimes they'll have blurbs, but it's always full name. And then you can go look those people up on LinkedIn, which is where a lot of professionals live in our space and go look them up by name, validate that A, they were in the Talent Stacker program. B, their current job title is as a Salesforce professional. And then if you really want to go for it, you can send them a DM.

11:39Are they always going to respond? I don't know. It's up to that person. But it's verifiable, right? You can go talk to the people who have done the thing and they're not going to give you a referral link and they're not going to give you an affiliate code. They're just going to tell you what it's like being inside of this thing. So you can do your homework. Now, if you're one of those people who gets an email and somebody tries to sell you something for two grand and you just go, boy, I hope this is it. And you swipe your credit card. That's one way to go about it. Or you could do a little research, you could do a little homework and you can go talk to the people because they're real, right?

12:09Like people who do these testimonials, they better be real people and you can actually go talk to them because they're real people. So I think being skeptical is core to being smart, being safe, being savvy with our finances and our time and energy. But I've heard a lot of times, especially early on when we didn't have receipts, when we didn't have that credibility to say, look at all these people we've helped. Now it's like if you go to talentstacker.com forward slash wins, all you're going to see is a wall of stories. I think it's like 70 stories of different individuals from different backgrounds and different walks of life that have had success with this transition, whether it be education or health care, blue collar, stay at home parents, high school kids, college kids, anything and everything in between.

12:52and you can find yourself in those stories and then decide, is this something I want to do? Or is this maybe not interesting to me? But all that to say, be skeptical. But I've heard so many times, if it sounds too good to be true, it is too good to be true. And I think to put that is on the end of it is too good to be true is so limiting in life. It basically means when there is something exceptionally good in this world, we should immediately believe it is a lie and run from it, which effectively means you're going to live your entire life running from all of the exceptionally good things in the world because they're too good to be true.

13:32And every now and then something is simply true and you should do your research and you should make sure it's credible and you should make sure it's not one of the things that's too good, but not everything in life is too good to be true. There are great things in life. Well, I have a very personal story for that, right? Is travel rewards. I think that is the perfect case in point of, man, this sounds incredible. This sounds way too good to be true. And I'm coming off as like some horribly skeptical person. I think most people who listen to the show know that I'm pretty open minded, positive outlook kind of guy.

14:03But I mean, I was as skeptical as any human on earth when I heard about travel rewards because it sounded crazy. Like, how is this even possible? And I did my research. I did literally thousands of hours of research and I realized, okay, this is for real. And what I essentially did, which was basically what you're doing is I helped teach people how to do something. I cut through the noise. I figured out kind of the 80, 20 analysis of travel rewards. I was never the world-class expert on it, but I was able to teach people to get started and realize like, okay, here were my objections and here's what I came up with.

14:37And I'm a reasonably reputable guy, CPA, blah, blah, blah, you know, all that kind of stuff. Like not just like doing some crazy stuff here. And I think that that kind of example really does help. So I also love how you immediately went to like, hey, you should go and DM people on LinkedIn. So that reminds me of your other episode, which was 379, which was the hidden job market. And you gave just a ton of really actionable piece of advice for how to find those jobs, how to find things that aren't just obviously apparent, how to network, how to make real connections. And that was one of those episodes that, you know, in fairness, I don't reference it as often as I should, because it was phenomenal.

15:18So I'm glad this is like the perfect reminder in my own brain. Like that's something that needs to go to the very top of the list. Because I mean, honestly, what we're doing here, why we're doing this update episode is there are a lot of people looking to transition into a career, into some new career. It may or may not be Salesforce, may not be tech, whatever. It's irrelevant. The skills you gave on that episode 379, that was just uniformly and universally helpful. So I definitely want to reference that. Everybody should check that out. And you'll get a sense of what Bradley brings to the table.

15:51And I think that's the important thing, right? Because what you're doing, as I understand with Talent Stacker, is you can get Salesforce certified just like anything on your own. You can learn, you can figure it out. It doesn't cost very much or if anything, honestly, and obviously you can specify, but what you've built is a career development program. And I think that's why it obviously has a significant price tag to it, but it's not just, Hey, this is an online course. Sign up for my videos for a hundred bucks, 200 bucks, whatever it is, right? Like it's a completely different animal. Yeah, I think we differentiated it early on as there are courses and what I would expect from a course would be, like you said,$100,$200 or less.

16:35And I'm going to learn a very specific thing, probably DIY videos and text. And I'll come out on the other side and maybe I'll have a certification, like a Salesforce certification. And those are out there. They're a dime a dozen. You can pick your poison and go with the trainer that you want to go with and pay$20,$30,$40,$50 and get a Salesforce certification. In fact, Trailhead is the free online training platform that Salesforce has. And you can go on there and train for free. And that's one of the biggest things that we see from people who are already in the Salesforce community. And they're like, why would you join Talent Stacker, a program like that?

17:08You can just go on Trailhead for free. And it's like, yeah, it's really, really good for getting a certification. But a certification doesn't get you a job. It's not quite that easy. And there's a few different things that go into it. I won't go too deep. But basically, it's like, if you want a job, you have to get a Salesforce certification. That's the first thing. I would call that about 10 % of the deal. That's your Salesforce administrator certification. After that, you need to have a strong network because everybody always says like your network is your net worth, but then they don't tell you how to network to build that net worth, right?

17:37So we talk a lot about networking, building your brand. Typically, it's on LinkedIn because it's a professional social media platform and how to get in front of those jobs, like you said, the hidden job market. But there's a few different steps, right? We need to get you hands-on experience so that you go into interviews and you actually can talk about things like, hey, what's your biggest strength or weakness? And you actually have real projects to talk about. Or what's the work that you've done that you're most proud of? And you can reference Salesforce work or technical work, not being a father or something like that, which is still great, but it doesn't apply to that individual, right?

18:11It's like, okay, yeah, you're a great person, but I need somebody to do this job. So it's the certification, it's your network, it is your interview readiness and your hands-on experience. Those are really the four core, I'll just say milestones of what we train you for. And again, that's live instructor-led training. There's some self-led in there. We do meetups in person and all kinds of different things. So it's much, much bigger than just swipe a credit card, get access to the online portal to click next, next, next, next, next until you're done. It's an engaged community of individuals. And most people, especially now, are saying the biggest value long term to being inside a talent stacker is the community because we have people who have been in it for three years.

18:53And now guess what? They're managers and they're making hiring decisions on who to hire. And guess who they're hiring? They're fellow talent stacker members. And if they can't hire them, they're at least getting them interviews and they're getting them a step forward in the process. And that is huge when you can basically purchase into an immediate network where when you stamp the talent stacker logo on your resume and your LinkedIn profile, your portfolio, boom, like it's instant awareness that you are part of this, this network in this group. And everybody tries to help each other. And it's really more than I ever could have imagined.

19:24So on top of the actual training, we have this beautiful thing that emerged just as part of facilitating this. So yes, it's been unimaginable. That's amazing. Thanks for listening to ChooseFI and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support ChooseFI is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at choosefi.com slash cards. I keep this page constantly updated, so it should always be the top resource for you. Thanks for being part of our community and for your support. All right, Bradley, I want to rapid fire some questions on you. So do you have a rough sense of how many ChooseFI listeners have gotten actual jobs, like have transitioned into a salesperson career?

20:10Yeah, we do, actually. So in preparation to come hang out with you today, we pulled the numbers and the data is a little fuzzy, but it's somewhere between 400 and 500 individuals have said ChooseFI is where I heard about Talent Stacker and now I've landed a job. So we're talking in the last three years, we've had over 100 people a year, close to 200 people a year landing jobs that heard about it from ChooseFI. So thank you to ChooseFI for helping share this message. That's amazing. And do you have like even rough salary? I feel like it was somewhere like 60 to 80 starting. Is that a rough estimate?

20:46Yes. I've got these numbers on the back of my hand because we share them every month publicly on LinkedIn and in our newsletter. letter. So average entry level salary for 2023 was just over$72 ,000. So that's no tech background, no college degree, no experience, first job, just over$72 ,000. So if you want to say 65 to 75, that's going to be right inside the ballpark of expectations. Time to job landed takes about five months. Keep in mind that our typical member has a full-time job. They can put in about, I'd say 10 to 15 hours a week on average of study time. And so that's going to be getting your certification, all the things we talked about, right?

21:25The certification, the networking, the interview prep, the hands-on experience, all that stuff, plus applying for jobs, going through interview processes, just applying for a job and going through an interview process can take a month. So to think you could do it much faster, I think would be naive. But I would say if you say four to six months to making$65 ,000 to$75 ,000 in a new career path, that's really what I would want you to be expecting. Yeah, that's pretty remarkable. Do you have a sense... So okay, When someone signs up for a program, an online course, whatever, any type of program, there's obviously a whole range of the amount of work they put in.

22:02Right. So I'm sure you've had thousands of people sign up for Talent Sacker and some percentage of them drop off, don't finish. That's their own issue. Right. Like, yeah, let's just put those people to the side. But of the people that have literally done everything you've asked, right, like they have done all the projects, they've done all the networking. They would have showed up. I'm making stuff up. They showed up for Facebook lives that you have, whatever it is. They did everything. Do you have a sense of like what percentage of them roughly have gotten jobs? Yeah. So we keep a lot of data.

22:35Obviously, we're data people. We use Salesforce. It's our CRM. We keep up with all of our customers. So we know exactly what's going on. Can I interrupt you? I'm not serving up softballs here. These are literally just questions I'm asking off the top of my head. So just for the avoidance of doubt for anybody in the audience, like I would not have imagined that you had that right off the top of your head. I just, yeah. So keep going. Yeah. No, I love data. I love data analytics. I live it. I have my dashboards ready. I look at them literally every single day. So the stuff you're asking is stuff that our typical potential customers ask, right?

23:05So yeah, it's not that you prepped me for these questions. It's that this is what we get asked on a daily basis. So I always have these ready. Our whole support team would have these answers ready, right? So to answer that question coming in, yes. So what we do is we actually are indicator of completion. We don't say you have to do everything. We say, hey, look, you got to get certified. You got to go through our hands-on experience simulation projects. And if you do that and you participate, then we consider you having completed the program. And out of the individuals who complete the program, it's over 85%.