Episode Information
Show Notes
In this powerful episode of Career Downloads, Manuel Martinez sits down with Asal “Vox” Gibson, CEO and founder of Cyroot and president of Cyroot Academy. Vox shares her extraordinary career path that began as an immigrant who didn’t speak English and worked in exchange for groceries.
Vox takes us through her journey of determination and growth: becoming a RadioShack store manager at just 20 years old, transitioning to automotive sales, building a successful career in financial services, and eventually working in defense contracting with top security clearance.
Throughout the conversation, Vox reveals the values and mindset that propelled her success: an unwavering work ethic, hunger for knowledge, and willingness to start from scratch in entirely new fields. She explains how each career transition taught her valuable skills that built upon one another, creating a foundation for her current roles leading both a cybersecurity company and a nonprofit providing free education to military personnel.
Key moments include:
The origin story of her military call sign “Vox” (meaning “voice of the people”)
How she overcame language barriers and financial hardships after arriving in America
Why critical thinking skills matter more than credentials in technology careers
Her approach to screening job candidates for problem-solving abilities
How she’s now paying forward the opportunities she received by creating educational programs for transitioning military personnel
This conversation offers practical wisdom about career advancement, the importance of being teachable, and finding purpose through helping others succeed. If you’re looking to transform your career or seeking inspiration on overcoming obstacles, this episode delivers actionable insights from someone who’s mastered the art of career reinvention.
Listen to the full episode to hear Vox’s complete story and learn how she’s now helping others find their own path to success.
Episode release date: April 1, 2025
#CareerDownloads #CareerTransition #TechLeadership #CyberSecurity #VeteransSupport
Transcription
Manuel: Welcome everyone. My name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads where each episode I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their experience and their background to try and uncover any actionable advice that you can uncover as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode I have with me Asal Gibson, also goes by call sign “Vox”. So there’s a, sounds like there’s a pretty interesting story around that so I’m excited to dig into that. So I met Asal at a networking event. I didn’t get much of a chance to kind of interact with her, you know, started to look at her LinkedIn profile, saw a lot of what she was posting, what she was doing. I looked at her background and felt that she would be an amazing guest to kind of bring on and just learn more about kind of what she’s done throughout her career and, you know, anything that she might be able to impart onto others. So she teaches part-time, she’s been a project manager, she also has started a non-profit, she’s, you know, was in the military, still helps out the military. So there’s a number of different ways that this conversation can go and I’m actually really excited because this, I just have the feeling that this is probably going to be a two -part series at some point. So with that I will go ahead and introduce Asal. Hi.
Asal: Hi.
Manuel: I appreciate you coming on and taking the time to kind of share your story and your experiences. So to kind of get started, normally what I ask people is kind of what your current role is and I know that you have multiple different ones so you can name them all, pick a couple and then just kind of a brief summary of some of the roles and responsibilities just so that people can get an understanding of kind of who “Vox...