Alana Franklin’s vocal talent led her to study opera in college. As she decided she wasn’t going to go pro, the job market pulled her into assistant and office management roles. And those roles eventually pulled her into an Exec Admin position at Amazon.   

There she spent her days steeped in tech but unable to directly participate. Though Amazon had some opportunities for internal pivots into tech, the people in her organization seemed unable to see her as anything other than an Admin. She knew she belonged in software engineering, but how was she going to convince her colleagues, employers, and organization without having to go all the way back through college?   

She started teaching herself programming concepts with a combination of books, websites, and sheer brute force. Meanwhile, she researched other avenues into technology careers and landed on Apprenti. The studying she’d been doing paid off when she took the assessment and her ranking earned her a spot in Microsoft’s maiden cohort of software engineering apprentices.   

As she started the C# training with TLG Learning, she found her earlier self-study and preparation gave her an inside track on absorbing the information while also helping her classmates.  When she  began the year of on-the-job training at Microsoft, Alana was quickly productive with Microsoft’s coding tools and methodologies. With the assistance of an excellent mentor and the support of her team, Alana was able to slide right into an FTE role at Microsoft.  

Alana learned software engineering because that’s who she is.  Microsoft hired her because she’s bold enough to take her place. And we are glad to partner with Apprenti to help deliver the training that helps people become who they are.