As a minority plugged into the diaspora community, I noticed a trend of a lot of immigrants wanting to transition from blue collar jobs to corporate jobs or grow their business. The more recognized I was getting in my community, the more time I spent answering questions, reviewing resumes, providing advice, running mock interviews and more. There were a lot of days where my sessions would start from 5-7 PM and would not end until 1-2 AM. It was getting ridiculous. I was basically repeating myself to a different person every night. While I enjoyed helping out, it just wasn’t sustainable. The personal touch helped me motivate, coach and be more effective, but over time I needed a scalable model.
I first started with a conference call, then an actual in-person training course. Ultimately, I decided to write more about the topic and provide resources online. This helped me deal with 2 fundamental issues. First, reach way more people and persist the information. There’s only so many people I could reach on those calls and those classes. Second, I wasn’t wasting my time with people who only wanted the secret sauce to more income. Somewhere along the line, I came across people who wasted hours of my time discussing tips on getting into IT and providing value, when all they wanted to know was the quickest way to land that high paying job, how much I was making and shallow things like that. It was frustrating because the intentions aren’t always obvious, and I often spent a bit of time invested before discovering the real motive.
I spent the first 9 years of my professional career working outside IT, the transition into IT is something I know first hand. After 9 years of working experience, there’s no way I was going to start from the ground up. That’s exactly what I did. I didn’t really have people share information with me. I decided I would share information with others to speed up their process, and help them navigate the path better.
