Army Pilot Makes His Way Into The Amazon Cloud

As a child, Luke Thompson competed as a gymnast.  The early discipline and physical fitness paid off when he enlisted in the Army.  He set his sights on Special Forces and was selected for training. 

As expected, his personal life grew alongside his career and he met and married his wife.  While he was getting good news about making the cut for Special Forces training, his wife was getting the good news about expecting their first child.  

Family on his mind, he set aside his Green Beret aspirations and opted for flight school. He served the remainder of his seven years of service as an Aviation Officer flying scout helicopters. 

As their family expanded with a second child, the civilian-life pull became irresistible. Luke hung up his rotors and settled with his family in sleepy central Oregon. Though the location was idyllic, it presented a problem: what to do for a career?  He attended school full time after leaving the military, trying to find his calling again.

He studied everything from Fire Science to emergency medicine and pre-med Biology. Since he always loved technology and figuring out how things worked, Apprenti caught his eye when they were mentioned in Army Times.

He had a feeling he could make his way in tech, so he started the assessment and application process. By January of 2020, he was in Camp Murray, WA beginning his three months of training as a TLG IT Pre-Apprentice in the Network Development Engineer program. 

A month into Pre-Apprenticeship, the global pandemic hit with cascading effects on in-classroom training. For Luke, it meant quickly rejoining his family in Oregon and endeavoring to complete the training online from his spare bedroom.  This mighty veteran thought nothing of it. 

Luke graduated from Pre-Apprenticeship in April, but not before landing a coveted Software Design Engineer Military Apprenticeship with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Thanks to the offer from AWS, Luke and his family relocated and resettled in Washington. Here he continues his remote training and will soon move into his Software Engineering role at full stride.

Apprenti and Amazon’s AWS Military Apprenticeship shrewdly opens doors and creates pathways for talent and grit like Luke’s to come solve the challenges of the tech sector. Through this, Luke has found his calling again.