- Mary Awodele founded My Tech Bestfriend to help less representative workers get into tech.
- He has helped some students double or triple their income in entry-level tech roles.
- He wants to help them find “boring” jobs that are less competitive but have high salaries.
Mary Awodele began her tech career as a self-taught systems administrator. She moved fields from doing sales work and pursuing nursing by completing a dozen IT certifications, such as ServiceNow trainings for system administrator and professional scrum master. Now, his full-time gig helps others do the same.
Over the past nine months, Awodele, the founder and CEO of the tech-education program My Tech Bestfriend, has helped more than 120 people get new tech roles. He said that in some cases, he has seen students make from making $ 40,000 a year to $ 100,000 in their new tech job.
But not just in salary. In My Tech Bestfriend, Awodele said his goal is to increase wealth in minority homes for future generations. The move to tech could come with life -changing salary bumps that “could honestly change an entire blood line,” Awodele said.
Having a stable, well -paid tech job can be “a massive, huge life change and a huge game changer” by giving people the security to take care of their households. “It’s deeper in me than like, ‘Here’s your job. Here’s your salary,'” Awodele said.
The philosophy behind the effort is to link people to tech roles that Awodele calls “boring but paid,” his term for lucrative positions that often go unnoticed. Focusing on “roles that no one wants to do” helps candidates find positions with high job security and high salaries with lower barriers to entry, according to Awodele.
“It doesn’t mean that the roles are really boring. It just means more profitable and hidden positions that a lot of people ignore,” Awodele said.
These jobs may include special roles such as engineers, system administrators, and project managers for software such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, SharePoint, and Jira.
And people like the effort. In the first 24 hours of opening applications for the latest cohort of its tech-education program, 700 people applied, Awodele said. Tech companies are also getting attention, as Awodele meeting with Microsoft etc to talk about staffing partnerships.
The My Tech Bestfriend approach is part technical skills and part mentorship. Career assessments with students help them find a role that matches their personality and interests. Then, quarterly cohorts attended instructor -led training sessions with projects based on real -life activities and had access to help with résumé and interview preparation. The cohorts last approximately three months and cost $ 4,000 to $ 5,000.
“There’s a huge misconception that no one takes entry-level people,” Awodele said. But by producing résumés that match a candidate’s talents and qualifications, candidates get their first high -paying tech roles.
“It’s really just about patience and keywords and adapting yourself and being able to communicate your résumé and really sell yourself in the best way you can,” Awodele said.
And students told Insider the program worked. Isabella Beltri is a My Tech Bestfriend student, and she works as a data project manager and technical recruiter at data firm Mammoth Growth. He uses the program to help get promotion in the company.
“My biggest takeaway is not being afraid to just step out of my comfort zone and learn any tool, learn a new skill,” Beltri said. The efforts have already caught the attention of the company’s chief technology officer, who is working with the company to further support Beltri’s growth, he said.
Shakara Whitehead, a junior developer of ServiceNow, attended the My Tech Bestfriend program to move careers from the medical field to tech. He said Awodele showed moral support as he applied for jobs, and after about 10 rejections, he saw a new role.
Along with new benefits like unlimited paid hours and working remotely, “I was able to triple my income,” Whitehead said, adding: “I like it. And I’m just shouting at everyone to get into tech.”