Melissa shares her experience making the leap into a new career in tech with Franklin’s Network Engineering Pre-Apprenticeship. Around twenty years ago, Melissa started her career with a Bachelor’s Degree in Environmental Horticulture from the University of California Davis. She's had several different kinds of jobs – from working with animals to customer service – and also became a mom. Then, a life event prompted her to re-evaluate and discover she wanted to make a switch to tech.

“I didn't really feel like I was reaching my full potential,” she explains. “I wasn't growing every day. It didn't feel like the future that I wanted to build for my family. And so I started looking at technology and it just kind of checked all those boxes for me, all the things that I was looking for.”

Melissa considered a degree but decided to pursue an apprenticeship instead as she wanted to start working and learning in the real world.

She reflects, “I didn't know if I wanted to pursue a degree. I didn't know if I wanted to put in the time. I just wanted to get in there. I wanted to get working. I wanted to get the experience.”

Through Franklin’s Pre-Apprenticeship program, she fell in love with Network Engineering.

“My kids just think I'm the coolest when I can pull up a command line and do something, they think I’m like a hacker!” she joked.

Melissa also developed a passion for the coding language Python, which prompted her to launch a YouTube channel called “Pea-Sized Python.”

UPDATE: At the time of this interview, she was actively pursuing a full-time position and has since been hired in her first Network Engineering role. Congratulations Melissa from the whole Franklin team!

Mixed & Edited by Next Day Podcast.

Frankly Speaking – Adventures in Tech Apprenticeships was produced by Franklin Skills (formerly Franklin Apprenticeships), a woman-owned tech apprenticeship company on a mission to unlock the potential of the American workforce. Franklin offers upskilling, reskilling, coaching, and apprenticeships for a range of tech roles, such as cybersecurity, help desk, IBM Z, network engineering and software engineering.

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