I have always enjoyed the ability to positively impact people's lives. So after graduating college I found myself entering the world of recruiting. I was able to help people connect with companies that would grow their potential and of course help put food on their table. While I was a recruiter I worked in several industries, hiring everything from nurses, to warehouse employees, but in the long run the roles I enjoyed most were technical.
As a technical recruiter, I had to become very familiar with processes and terminology. I had to know the difference between Java and JavaScript, SQL and MySQL and so many other things. I had been interested in web development previously, however these new roles really sparked my interest to start considering a career in software development.
As things progressed in my recruiting career I came face to face with a challenge that many people face, layoffs. As any company has layoffs one of the first groups to get impacted is the recruiting team, if you are not hiring, you don’t need people to help in the hiring process. And so after the second time, I was determined to make the career change.
I put in some time working on my own, learning online and following tutorials from books. I never felt that I had reached a point where I was ‘career ready’, and so I decided to join Boise Codeworks Immersive class. From there my skills and knowledge really blossomed. I have a natural knack for mentoring and training others. I was approached by the CEO, Jake, to potentially join the team as an Instructor I jumped at the chance and haven’t looked back.
I work at CodeWorks because it’s the perfect combination, I get to make a difference in people's lives and work on development projects. While not all of our students have goals to become software developers, what we teach helps them to either discover ways that they can improve their day to day work life, or completely change careers and join the developer community.
In addition to the impact we have with students, the community we have among one another is incredibly supportive. We are able to tackle fun side projects such as building out tools for us to use in our personal lives, or fun games both for computers and VR that we can later take out into the community and teach. We play games at lunch with each new class as we get a whole new set of coworkers every 13 weeks, with them comes a whole new set of personalities, ideas and puzzles to solve.
As CodeWorks continues to grow and expand, so does the knowledge I get to teach to an ever improving set of students. Since we adjust our curriculum after every course I too get the opportunity to improve myself and grow as a developer and Instructor insuring better student outcomes.
