There are many directions you can take your career, and you can get lost as well. Do you agree?
Yes, I’m kind of lost as well with my job already. You want me to learn this, but I know this. That’s just a tipping point. Now you need to move up into this to get more into the advanced stages of it.
Just going through this seven-month program of Yellow Tail Tech was like an eye-opener. Once you get more knowledge and know what you’re doing, you step into the real world.
You need to discipline your career, discipline your learning, and focus your time, because there’s a difference between your career and what your job needs.
Your job wants you to learn a lot of things. What are you committed to becoming in your career? You need to understand the difference and be committed. Yes, committed to delivering what the job needs, but commit to your career—commit to going deep into a very particular area, you don’t get lost and get distracted too easily, you know.
How did you come about finding Yellow Tail Tech? How did you decide on Yellow Tail Tech?
No background in IT. My whole background was in entertainment. I did circus for 15 years. I traveled the world as a performer, hung up my tights 12 years ago, and decided to join Cirque du Soleil and work backstage as a rigging technician out in Las Vegas.
Then something just hit me—it’s like, hey, entertainment won’t always be there. Entertainment needs people to entertain. You need a crowd to entertain, to bring in money. It was at that point that I decided, OK, let me try and do something else.
Joined the Air Force Reserves. I went into civil engineering, and then luckily enough, they were like, How about you try stuff in computers and cyber within the Air Force? I tried that and I decided I liked it.
I went into college and took college courses where I went for Linux Plus, Introduction to Linux, Introduction to Information Systems, Network Plus, Security Plus, and then it hit me. I was like, this will take about two years to get an Associate’s degree or four years to get a Computer Science degree.
Then I started looking into bootcamps, what’s out there. And then I saw bootcamps going, “Oh, do this for 7 days and it’s gonna cost you $7,000.” That’s not for me, do this Linux hardcore bootcamp for 3 days, and it costs you $2,800.” That’s not for me.
I moved from Las Vegas to Minnesota. And then it just hit, it popped up on my Instagram: Yellow Tail Tech. I was like, What is this?
I had my doubts. I was like, Why is it. OK, let’s give it a shot. And then I had my first interview with Jubee, and he explained everything. You just had to come in with an open mind, and then within the first month, I saw this.
This is new to me. Just coming back again, I had to put in the extra hours apart from what was being taught to me in class. You know, you only get like your two hours on, what was it—Mondays and Wednesdays, and then luckily enough for me, we decided to open a group on Saturdays to meet up, which was extra on top of that.
With Linux, you have to be willing to do outside research beyond the class, because if you don’t, you only have that information in class. And when you have to figure things out for yourself—which is what IT is, you’ll struggle.
How do you see your career in the next two years?
Keep growing with Avature and as a cloud engineer. Try to switch careers within the Air Force and move into cybersecurity. Grow that, and then shoot for Red Hat System Engineer and become that, and then move into DevOps.
What cloud platform do you mostly use now?
Our company uses AWS.
Exclusively, everything I have to—it’s—and I didn’t have a background in AWS. I watch videos on my own and study on my own. So again, this is stuff you have to research on your own.
The company goes, here are some videos we can offer you. We can pay for you to go, but before you go, do these things. I have to sit on my PC and go, What is this, How does this work, Do my own research.
Did you do it yourself, or did Yellow Tail Tech help you build your resume?
I like to say 70/30. 70% my input, 30% with Yellow Tail Tech. You bring in the resume, and it gets ironed out on what is needed, what should be there, and what should not be there.
And then of course, what you put on there, you have to be able to defend.
We try to commit you to building your own resume, and we help you critique it, improve it, and iron it out. Because what used to happen, when you build a resume for a guy, he doesn’t even care about reviewing the resume to the point where he doesn’t even know what’s in his own resume.
I’ve seen that multiple times where the guy goes to an interview and they ask him about something, and he’s like, “Well, I don’t know about this concept.” But you have it in your resume. How do you not know what’s in your resume?
To answer your question about Boris, it’s 70/30. You bring your resume, and we give you a workshop. Now we’ve improved how we help you with your resume. You get more resources, but we commit you to learning how to build your own resume for multiple reasons.
First, you can own your own resume.
Second, you can keep improving your own resume after that first job. Because you’re gonna need to keep on refining and ironing out your resume. A resume is a living document. It’s always improving and changing.
And a lot of people don’t realize that you can tweak your resume differently for different positions. In two years, you might want to tweak your resume about what knowledge or tasks you highlight, according to what you’re trying to be relevant for.
Resume building is a skill like any other skill that you need to know about.
What did you learn from Yellow Tail Tech?
What I got out of Yellow Tail Tech was the fact that I felt confident to go and take the Red Hat certification.
There are other places where they’ll say, “OK, here’s a three-day course, you learn Linux.” And then they’ll just teach you maybe one level of Linux, but then there are so many more things you have to learn.
You have to learn how to break into Linux without knowing the password and how to chroot into it. This is stuff I learned from Yellow Tail Tech. How to switch from one server to another.
I learned from Yellow Tail Tech things that linger. I didn’t know about Yellow Tail Tech, or I should say Linux, which I got from you. And then out of that, I got classmates with whom I still stay in contact.
Ready to start your tech journey like Anele? Book a 10-minute intro call with Yellow Tail Tech today!
