This is the backstory of DeCoda, forged in the reality of the Jamaican talent landscape and engineered specifically for those ready to break through.

 

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The Origin Story: Obsession with the Algorithm

The founder of DeCoda didn't start with a desire to coach. He started with an obsession with understanding why brilliance fails.

Witnessing thousands of highly qualified graduates hit the pavement every single year in Jamaica, alongside exceptionally well-qualified and hard working existing candidates —competing in a brutal market where 250 applicants fight over one decent chair—the founder realized the system wasn't broken; it was simply coded against standard "qualified" talent. Qualification was the floor. Success required an execution level that university, the streets and existing coaches and guides hadn't taught.

The real tipping point came when the founder saw brilliant men & women —architects of logic, engineers of complex systems, service-centric individuals —consistently filtered out by corporate interview protocols that couldn't handle their specific educational, technical and cultural excellence. These weren't "failed candidates"; they were winners lacking the specific tool-set to execute the final stage.

Standard (local) "corporate" coaching, with its focus on "local and insular-lessons-learned", "hope and hardwork" and "standardized, formal, generic answers", was insulting to their intelligence and useless in this new high-stakes, necessary error-free environments.

There was a profound systemic gap. It needed to be closed.

The Philosophy: The Coder and the Coda

The founder approached this like a critical system error. The solution had to be technical, surgical, and definitive.

Based on actual lived-experience, he developed a methodology that combined the precise, logical approach of a Coder (systemizing human interaction) with the definition of a Coda (the powerful, concluding passage that resolves a movement into a definitive end).

Thus, DeCoda was born.

The Mission: Possession, Not Competition

DeCoda is not standard career services. We don't "help you find jobs" or "play the odds." We engineer outcomes with you and for you.

We provide the definitive toolkit designed to give you, our clients—specifically the next generation of high-performing individuals —what the market has long denied them:

your unfair advantage.

By decoding the systemic gaps of high-stakes interviews, DeCoda transforms technical brilliance into surgical execution. We are the final, definitive note that ends the conversation and secures the win.

The Founder: Peter Merry

For decades Peter was a Senior Public Servant, serving the people of the UK and the European Union leading dozens of teams of up to 600 FTE to deliver services and transformations across a range of Service Lines.

On leaving the Public Sector Peter joined the private sector joining the world's 5th Largest IT and Consulting company [CGI], leading their Public Sector Practice in the UK and then Canada and growing it 114% year-on-year.

Following CGI, Peter took a job as a Business Unit Leader running Amazon Web Services [AWS] Federal Government Business.  Here Peter scaled the Business an exceptional 1130% over his tenure

Following AWS, Peter took a job in a start-up as the VP of Sales & Delivery, successfully scaling the Business which was subsequently bought following its annual growth of 165% year-on-year.

Following this successful exit, Peter was secured by Cisco to take an interim role running an element of their Federal Government Business, before being approached by Google to be an executive for their Public Sector Business where he landed and delivered over $4b of services.

On moving to Jamaica, Peter created DeCoda to support the excellent people he saw working repeatedly and tirelessly to try and secure jobs that they should be naturally attaining, and knew there was a better way.   

With his understanding and proven ability around how to repeatedly secure high value roles for jobs that had >425 applicants per role and a 99% failure rate, Peter wanted to share the skills and experience he had learned that placed him with the top 0.013% of candidates globally for the most competitive roles on the planet.

DeCoda was born, and it is here to help you

Thank you for reading this & Peter would love you to connect: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/petermerry-ottawa