Lisa Stanley: ‘I found out I still love to nerd’
Some soldiers give their lives to defend their country.
Some soldiers salute the dead when they come home.
Early on in her 20-year Army career, Lisa Stanley held that sacred role – team leader with the military funeral honors unit, also known as the honor guard.
“I realize it’s covered with a somber tone. But it really was an honor for me to do that. It was a highlight of my career,” says Stanley, who retired from the Army in 2021 at the rank of master sergeant.
“The work is not something you obviously take in complete stride, but it is something that you accept with a real sense of gratitude for being able to provide that service.”
Her honor guard group made sure recently deceased soldiers and veterans were buried with an American flag folded atop their coffin, and that their next of kin received that flag as “Taps” was played. Stanley’s honor guard unit, spanning just a few soldiers, traveled together to lead those funerals with graveside services and offer final salutes.
“We did this every day, several funerals a day, weekends, rain or shine,” Stanley says.
She ultimately completed her military career embracing a variety of duties in a variety of places, including deployments to Germany and Iraq. During the war in Iraq, she served two years as a senior human resources manager for the 19th Special Forces Group (Airborne). That assignment came with specialized equipment: parachutes for training jumps from airplanes.
But when she departed the Army, Stanley’s transition to the civilian world felt, for a time, like she was stepping into thin air.
“You miss the camaraderie, particularly if you’ve been through wartime. You were part of the club and now you’re out and you don’t know where you go,” Stanley says.
“What I told myself was: ‘I’m going to be good. I’m going to get this transition plan together and that plan is going to sort me out. All I have to do is complete a plan, right?’ If you give military people a list, we think we just have to check one through 10 and we’re going to be awesome.
“But then, you get out and it doesn’t happen that way. And then, of course, in comes the self-doubt. Like, did I plan wrong?”
In life, sometimes, the coincidental beats the planned.
In October 2021, Stanley happened to check out LinkedIn. She spotted a post about the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy.
She had no clue what it was, had never heard of it. She didn’t know anyone who had graduated from MSSA. Still, she was intrigued. In high school, she dabbled with HTML web design and C++, a programming language.
“If I hadn’t been on the internet that day or had not seen that post in time, I would have missed it,” Stanley says. “I put in my application, thinking it was very unlikely that I would get accepted.”
The stubborn self-doubts of a new veteran still needed shattering.
Then, in November 2021, she got a life-changing email from MSSA’s operations team: “You’re invited to continue the process.” She was asked to take a networking exam.
“I found out I still loved to nerd,” Stanley says. “I still loved analyzing data, producing presentations and working with programming languages. It was fun to me.”
Another email from MSSA arrived in early December: “You passed the exam. Let’s schedule an interview.” Once again, she passed that phase and was accepted into the academy’s December 2021 class.
Stanley opted for MSSA’s server and cloud administration learning path, which covers creating Windows Server workloads, implementing networking, virtual machines, Azure administration and more.
On the day she graduated in May 2022, she already had four job offers – all “100% due to MSSA” and its Alumni Network, she says. Stanley chose a role at Southwest Airlines, working as a Scrum master with teams developing software for app redesign.
“When veterans ask me about MSSA, I’m like, listen, my resume didn’t change from December to May, from before to after the academy. What changed was I had access to so many people,” she says.
“I had a front seat, with my resume going from the MSSA network out to hiring panels. That’s what made the difference. It’s not like I went to the academy and became a wizard at Azure. I went to the academy, and I was able to leverage myself into a better position.
“That, to me, is probably MSSA’s premier, distinguishing advantage.”
These days, she lives in St. Petersburg, Florida and works remotely for Aptive Resources, a federal government services agency based in Alexandria, Virginia. She’s received several promotions.
Her current role is deputy program manager, working primarily with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ office of information technology. One of her recent projects involved analyzing data in low-code projects. (Low-code is a type of visual programming that allows users to quickly build apps with minimal hand-coding.) Her home office is filled with four laptops, two computer monitors, two time zone clocks, a dog nearby – and the happy sense that one veteran’s initial mission is now complete.
“I don’t want people to think you go to MSSA and you’re going to come out having offers,” Stanley says. “You need to do the work. You need to understand the science of presenting yourself. But they’re out there looking (for jobs) for you.
“You just have to be available.”