Vets can jump to new careers. Consider them boot camps
Everyone has undoubtedly been asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up” at least a few (dozen) times throughout their lives. While I didn’t know what I wanted to do longterm, I knew from a young age that my career would begin with the military.
I enlisted in the Army right after graduating high school and spent five years working my way up to sergeant in the U.S. Army Ranger regiment.
Army Ranger School is one of the hardest schools in the military and was by far the most difficult thing I have ever accomplished. They put you in the worst situations possible to test your resolve under extreme stress and fatigue, often making you go with only one, maybe two meals a day and only an hour of sleep on a good night during training exercises.
I proudly graduated with many awards and achievements and knew that I could do anything I put my mind to.
Upon returning to civilian life, I moved home and found work doing carpentry, which I had always enjoyed. I had a great time building custom toy haulers and RVs but realized after about two years of making 15$ an hour that wasn’t where I wanted to settle for a career.
I knew I deserved more, so in early 2021, I decided I needed to make a big change and quit my job and enrolled in a full-time, 14-week coding boot camp called Coding Dojo. I haven’t looked back.
While the boot camp wasn’t as physically demanding as military boot camp, I learned that putting in extra effort will yield extra results, and that’s exactly what I was going to do.
While I had already taught myself some basic web development skills by that time, I was dedicated to giving 110% of my efforts to learn everything I could. I earned a “black belt,” the highest achievable grade, in all three full programming stacks: Python, JavaScript, and C#/.NET, and learned development fundamentals like HTML and CSS.
When it came time in the curriculum for projects, I would push the assignment a little further and add my own spin to personalize my work. I knew that everyone I was graduating with was going to have the same projects that I had but I knew putting some extra time into them even after they were due would help them to stand out.
By the time I graduated, I had three projects that were resume-worthy. With the help of my Coding Dojo career services manager, I set up my LinkedIn profile and portfolio for job interviews and learned how to network — an important part of any job hunt and an aspect often overlooked.
Less than three months after graduating boot camp in April, I met someone through the business connections I made on LinkedIn that was looking to fill a developer position at their company. They were kind enough to hop on a call with me, and afterwards was referred to the company’s hiring manager for an official interview.
I was offered the position and am proud to be working at Allata as a software development consultant since July, incredibly thankful for the change I made in my life.
As a U.S. military veteran, I know firsthand what it’s like to have to find yourself again after returning to civilian life. I hope that my story will encourage not only veterans, but anyone who wants more out of life to go out there and get it
It may be scary to make that jump, but if you use any and all resources you have, with hard work and determination, you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.