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“Lacking certification and education, I could not find a job in the field,” Thor said. “Getting A+ certification was the main reason I applied. But I came out with far more than I would ever have expected.” In addition to learning IT skills that equipped him for tech work, Thor came to appreciate that the college degree he always assumed he needed for an upwardly mobile IT career wasn’t really necessary. “IT-Ready taught me one very important lesson: That everything I learned throughout my life was just as important as the technical skills I was developing,” he said. “Those 10 years were not a waste of time. Accepting that fact has made me much stronger.” After graduating from IT-Ready and earning his CompTIA A+ certification, Thor secured full-time employment as a technical support representative with Pearson VUE. He started by providing basic help desk support – troubleshooting customers’ issues with software and hardware – and gradually took on more responsibility. He also took advantage of Pearson VUE’s professional development offerings for employees, learning website design and Java programming. With his newfound knowledge, he created a simple graphical user interface that allowed his co-workers to quickly connect to customers’ remote computers. Outside work, he used his knowledge to develop websites and programs for his church and community volunteer groups. Thor enjoyed working at Pearson VUE and could have crafted a long-term career there. “Pearson VUE offered a stable career
Creating Opportunities and Launching Tech Careers for 20 Years Creating IT Futures’ celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. Until 2010, the charity, which was named the CompTIA Educational Foundation originally, mainly helped military veterans and people in need, particularly people with disabilities, get a leg up in their careers by accessing online training from CompTIA’s partners and vouchers for CompTIA certifications. They also gave out hundreds of small scholarships to high schoolers who passed CompTIA certifications. While those programs certainly helped a couple thousand people, there was a piece missing in terms of making sure people landed IT jobs. The charity’s leadership knew their programming needed to be more hands-on to make sure the tech training and certifications led directly to IT careers. Creating IT Futures then spent the next couple of years researching and developing pilots of its IT-Ready career program. Launched in 2012,
IT-Ready has since become one of America’s most effective job training and placement programs, with 88 percent of students graduating and 86 percent of graduates landing a full-time paid position as an IT professional. Last year, IT-Ready expanded to Portland, Oregon, and Charlotte, North Carolina, and the charity plans to add more locations and more types of tech training classes in 2018, including its new IT-Ready QA class this spring. “We’ve launched the tech careers of more than 400 students in the Twin Cities alone through
and income, and I really like my team,” he said. “But I wanted to start a freelancing programming career.” So, last October, after working at Pearson VUE for nearly five years, Thor resigned to launch his own company. His tenure at Pearson VUE allowed Thor to pay off all personal debt, including his mortgage, as well as save enough money to survive the start of a small business. Thor said this has all been a dream come true. Not only is he now pursuing programming, his IT passion, but he has more time to travel the world, something he’s
always wanted to do. “I saved more than enough money to live a minimal lifestyle for four years and still travel,” he said. “In October, I traveled to China for three weeks. It was the first time I have ever traveled to another country.” Thor said he is grateful for IT-Ready giving him the skills and the confidence he needed to blaze his own IT career path. “If it wasn’t for the IT-Ready program, I would never have been able to re-live my dream again,” Thor said.
our IT-Ready program,” said Charles Eaton, CEO, Creating IT Futures. “Nowwe’re expanding upon that training and offering a new class for future software testers with IT-Ready QA. Software testing is a critical part of today’s software development industry. Careful destruction of software can be just as valuable as brilliant creation, and in our software testing curriculum, students will learn the best practices for breaking software and squashing bugs.”
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CompTIAWorld | SPRING 2018
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