Pandemic Perseverance: How One Former Smoothstack Trainee Found the Silver Lining

Background

Like many others, the coronavirus pandemic disrupted Rebecca Gonzalez’s grand plans.

When the virus hit, Gonzalez was working as an administrative assistant and office manager. She had dropped out of college and planned to go back one day but soon became one of the millions of Americans out of work and struggling to make ends meet — and returning to college was becoming a distant thought.

“I lost my job, and I had no way to pay for all the stuff anymore,” said Gonzalez.

Challenges

Beki developed foundational skills at a coding bootcamp prior to joining Smoothstack — “knowing nothing” and finishing as one of the top students. She called it a “big confidence boost.”

Her biggest challenge, after the bootcamp, was figuring out how to advance her career.

The Turning Point

When she finished the program, she turned to applying for jobs, eventually landing at Smoothstack. She landed in the program for several reasons:

• Gaining a foothold in the industry
• Guided Training

“You won’t be alone. You’ll have people helping you [like] your trainers [and] you’ll have people who you can reach out to,” said Gonzalez. “It does help. It gives you a little bit of those training wheels that you wish you had for a lot of different careers.”

Training Experience and Smoothstack’s Unique Approach

The training wheels included a fully covered education with multi-month training — followed by guaranteed client work. The training, albeit intense with weekly assignments, allowed Gonzalez to properly assist Smoothstack’s clients.

“Smoothstack picked me up, and it trained me on a whole different stack: Java, AWS, Spring Boot,” said Gonzalez. “Some days I’m working in Java, other days I’m back into Node, and then other days I’m in AWS or figuring out what’s wrong with my terraform configurations.”

Outcome

For Gonzalez now, those training wheels are long gone. She’s developed her foundation and is now providing those training wheels to others as an instructor at Smoothstack.

“I’m living on my own. I have my own place, a two-bedroom apartment where I have an office and setup and everything. And I’m actually pursuing some of my hobbies now, and I’m like, ‘this is a good start,’” said Gonzalez, who has remained at Smoothstack as an instructor teaching future batches of trainees. “Once I got into Smoothstack, it gave me that little bit [of a] boost. I [thought]: ‘Thank God I finally got something going.’”