IT Career

Copy of Student Success Story Luke Thompson

Army Pilot Makes His Way Into The Amazon Cloud

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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. 

Copy of Student Success Story_Kushal_NEW

“There’s no finish line in a Tech career”

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Kushal traveled from Nepal to East Texas to study and earn a B.A. in Journalism, after which he got enlisted in the United States Army. They assigned him to logistics, stationed him in Alaska, where this braveheart served for the next 4 years.

Kushal transitioned out of the service at JBLM in May of 2019. Transitioning in such close proximity to Seattle’s thriving tech sector, he realized a career in systems and software was attainable. In September 2019 he was accepted into TLG Learning’s IT Pre-Apprenticeship where he went from zero-to-sixty on Network Design Engineering fundamentals including Linux, Networking, AWS Cloud Practitioner and Python Scripting. By February he landed a contract working in one of Amazon’s Data Centers and by March he landed one of Amazon’s coveted Software Development Engineering Apprenticeships. This time he is going from zero-to-sixty on Data Structures, Algorithms, Java, and JavaScript.
Here’s what he has to share about his meteoric pace:

Why did you select TLG’s IT Pre-Apprentice program?

I came across TLG’s IT Pre-Apprentice program during a career fair session at JBLM. I found the program straight forward and had a very high job placement rate in the state. Besides, one of my friends who is also a military veteran had successfully transitioned into the civilian workforce through this program.

What has been the outcome (thus far)?

I’m currently a Software Development Engineer Apprentice with AWS. It has been a complete honor to work with talented AWS apprentices and learn new applications and language every day.

What advice would you offer anyone considering this track?

Tech is a great career and its constantly evolving. I will advise anyone to start from the basics and start learning because there is no finish line in this career. We all are in the same boat.

If you’re looking to transition into a career in IT, schedule a call with our team or click here to know more about our IT-Pre Apprenticeship Program!

Ed Says - 4 Pillars (1)

Four Pillars Of An IT Career

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“Because I get a lot of questions about how certifications fit into a person’s IT career path, I’d like to take some time to discuss the value of certifications, followed by which certifications might carry the most value for your individual situation.”

This applies whether you are new to IT, or if you have years of experience and or education in IT, and it applies whether your dream IT job is to work for a Fortune 100 or a small municipality. 

For a recruiter or hiring manager, there are 4 “pillars” which will hold up, or support your case to be hired for an IT position: 

  • Education/Training 
  • Experience 
  • Certification  
  • Soft Skills 

We used to call it a 3 legged stool – but then soft skills became more and more important, and now it may arguably be the most impactful of the 4 pillars. That’s because it encompasses such a broad range of skills –  

  • leadership skills 
  • people skills 
  • social skills 
  • communication skills 
  • personality traits 
  • attitudes 
  • social intelligence 
  • emotional intelligence quotient 
  • their competence with at least one recognized certification (more on that in the next blog). 

    One of the reasons I know that veterans can do extremely well in IT careers is that over the years, I’ve noticed that veterans are highly likely to score exceptionally well on soft skills (while there are always exceptions,  most veterans have these skills to a high degree, but it may take work to know how to highlight and translate them for a civilian employer). 

While the dream candidate for a position would have all 4 pillars covered equally, that doesn’t happen very often in the real world. Everyone will be stronger in at least one area and weak in another. But it is possible to make up for what you’re lacking in one area, by bolstering and scoring highly in other areas. Certifications can be an important way to compensate for a lack of specific job experience or education. For example, someone very new to IT, who lacks experience, can compensate by articulating their soft skills and having an industry-recognized certification to demonstrate the equivalent experience or education. 

In the last few years, when unemployment was low, especially in the IT sector, IT certifications were still important, but more for professionals seeking promotions, and employees receiving financial incentives for obtaining professional certifications. But with the recent spike in unemployment, even in the IT sector, technical certifications can be a significant factor in making hiring decisions. For a job-seeker, the significance of a certification isn’t to land the job for you – it’s to get you noticed enough to get you to the interview level 

I can be prone to ramble a bit. Luckily for both of us – we have some brilliant marketing people (thank you Kads!) who are great at telling me to cut it off and save it for another day. So I’ll chat about the specific certifications that could have the biggest impact in your specific job search in the next blog!