Jay, a Project Manager who Crescent Solutions placed at a banking institution, hails from Zephyrhills—a farming community in Central Florida—and knew at a young age that he wanted to get out of his small town. When he joined the Marine Corps, he traveled across the globe from Australia to all over Southeast Asia before he carved his path to where he is today. “I am definitely doing something that’s right in my acumen,” Jay said. “[The position is] not really technical and more with business which is where my main focus is.”
“I’m a little too high strung to sit behind a monitor,” he added.
Jay is an active person and when he has free time nowadays, he spends it surfing and traveling. In his earlier life, he pursued music education for his undergraduate studies at the University of South Florida in Tampa, which later led to a full-fledged career as a professional musician for nine years from 1979 to 1988. He played string and brass instruments, as well as piano in a jazz band and toured throughout Japan.
“But I got out of it because you always work weekends, you always work nights, you always work holidays—and you never get to dance,” he said.
He returned to school for an ancient history degree before he dove into the IT field. All the technical knowledge he procured was through on-the-job training. “I got a job as a web developer, and then a PHP/Linux developer,” Jay said. “The company I was with saw that I was much more than a coder because every time they checked for me I was not behind my desk—I was glad-handing the crowd and helping people with their projects and paperwork, and I climbed the ladder there.”
Eventually, his path led him to become the company’s Vice President of IT Operations, and he later formed his own company which designed user interfaces for online companies like eBay. After his company was acquired by a procurement software company, he stayed on as CIO, and later ventured into the world of supermarkets and their data centers.
When Jay met Rachel Hickey, a Crescent Solutions recruiter, he found her to be “extremely professional” and “friendly,” he said. She secured him an interview with the institution he currently works for, and he was hired 45 minutes after he met with them.
”Jay is an extremely personable professional individual with great enthusiasm and dedication towards the work he does,” said Brian Batistic, our Senior Recruiting Manager. “He has been a pleasure to work with and we hope to continue to work with him on his future professional endeavors.”
