Time for a change .. employee numero uno!

For over eight years I have been working for the same employer . It’s been a wonderful eight years:  I have met lots of wonderful colleagues, some of them will remain friends for my entire life and together we have travelled to places and have spend sometimes up to 14 hours a day working alongside friends to get work done. But we always found the time to end the day with a nice dinner and some drinks. Brussels, London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, New York, Frankfurt, Cologne, Hong Kong and Moscow, we have visited them all in the name of work. Magical times.

Over the course of eight years I became more and more VMware minded, up to the point where they started calling me ‘VMware fan boy’ at work. I don’t mind them calling me that, because it is not entirely unjustified. I honestly believe that VMware has the best enterprise ready products for virtualization , SDDC, automation, network virtualization etc.

Two years ago the mothership started calling me and I decided to start looking for a job at VMware. That was me keeping my eyes on the VMware recruitment site, talking to both people  who still work for VMware as to some who have left VMware. A fascinating experience, and if you desire to land a job at VMware I can only advise that you reach out to (former) VMware employees and have a talk with them.

At the end of last year  ITQ reached out to me and asked me if I would be interested to have a talk with them. ITQ had been on my mind for about a year but my mind was still set more on landing a job at VMware. I decided to have the talk anyway. A table at a restaurant at the border between Belgium and the Netherlands was booked, I took a day off at work, drove to the Netherlands to meet up with Johan Van Amersfoort and Francisco Perez van der Oord and … I arrived late. Never underestimate traffic in rush hour in the Netherlands. For about three hours we talked about my dreams and expectations, their dreams and expectations, their wish to start a new division in Belgium and expanding the ITQ family and their known excellence across the border, and that was the end of my dream of landing a job at the mothership and became a dream of joining ITQ.

Some weeks after that first meeting with Johan and Francisco,  I took another day off to meet up with Paul Geerlings. For a couple of hours we talked about where we come from, how life can take crazy turns, what ITQ wants to achieve, what I want to achieve, if my goals would fit into the ITQ goals, but also the opposite, if their goals would fit into mine!

About a month later I met with Tom Vallons and everything fell into place.  A contract was signed and in about a month I am joining Tom in the ITQ office in Leuven, Belgium.

Onwards to greatness!

Kim