I’m a flight attendant turned full-stack developer, and now I’m a UX Designer with 10 years of experience. My origin story isn’t as strange as you might think. There are so many career changers with fascinating and diverse backgrounds who are being overlooked and failing to gain traction in the career they’ve chosen. I think much of that is due to the extractive capitalism that boosted the bootcamp industry; however, a lot of the problems could be solved with better, more standardized hiring practices…which themselves rely on more knowledgeable leadership in design and in the rest of the business organization.
I know that many of these bootcamp graduates, recent college graduates, career changers and self-taught digital technologists have what it takes to be successful in the tech industry. These future employees may lack the training and social skills, but those can be learned.
I also know it’s expensive to invest in the wrong hire, and that building an internal apprenticeship program is costly. I believe with the right structure, combined with human-centered training, I can build a ‘universal’ apprenticeship agency. Providing professional and personal development that is no longer ‘taught in schools’ to make them well-rounded and capable of interacting at any level of industry will be the difference between a bootcamp graduate and a trained apprentice.
People deserve access to well-paying jobs with family-sustaining wages.
Section 174 of the U.S. tax code changes impacted tech companies and at least partially caused mass layoffs.