I went from being on food stamps to making $85,000 a year in my first job.
By Evan Ramzipoor, Workflow contributor
Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in the ESG issue of Workflow Quarterly
While on deployment to the Japanese island of Okinawa, U.S. Navy petty officer 3rd class Joseph Laudon found out that his military career would be over in 20 days.
After his honorable discharge, Laudon says he struggled. He had been a navy aviation mechanic and tried to transition into civilian work, but floundered. He faced personal challenges as well; in 2017 Laudon lost his house and went through a divorce. “I had no plan,” he says.
While in the Navy, a fellow sailor told him about a tech job he’d lined up post-deployment. This was on Laudon’s mind in 2019 when a ServiceNow recruiter reached out to him on LinkedIn to see if he was interested in breaking into tech.
“I had no idea what ServiceNow was,” says Laudon, laughing. “I grew up dirt-road poor in Texas. I was a farm kid. But I knew I wouldn’t have to work out in the heat all day. I could potentially work from home and be around my kids.”
Accepting the offer required a leap of faith. Laudon had remarried and he had a newborn son. Six months prior, the family had been unhoused. But Laudon decided to go for it. He left his home in Maryland and traveled to Philadelphia, where he went through a 10 week program—eight hours a day—learning basic coding and Now Platform admin skills.
When he finished the program, he got a job as a technical manager working with ServiceNow clients. Soon, Laudon had enough money to start his own consulting firm. “I went from being on food stamps to making $85,000 a year in my first job,” he says. “Now I make well over six figures working for myself. That’s unheard of where I come from.
Former Navy petty officer and NextGen participant Joseph Laudon and his family
ServiceNow is not alone in hosting an in-house IT training program for underserved talent. Gap launched This Way Ahead in 2007 to provide low-income families with jobs training, and Kaiser Permanente is partnering with the Workforce Development Council to create opportunities in the healthcare industry.
Nonprofits are also jumping in. California-based Bitwise, for example, trains thousands of students throughout the country to code. More than half of participants are women or people of color, and 40% live below the poverty line. Another organization, Per Scholas, has paired with more than 100 companies and foundations to train and secure jobs in tech for 16,000 students—mostly people of color—after completing a free training and professional development program.
NextGen leader Bahbahani says IT employers have historically been reluctant to recruit from underserved communities. “This is a diversity, equity, and inclusion issue,” she insists. “If employers are not more introspective and aware of their biases, we’re not going to move the needle.”
Last year, ServiceNow joined the U.S. Department of Defense’s SkillBridge program. SkillBridge provides hands-on job training to active-duty service members so they can secure a job in tech when they leave the military. Since the program expanded into SkillBridge, Laudon has been encouraging every vet he knows to participate. “Seeing the program now, the way it’s grown, is honestly a dream come true,” he says.
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Evan Ramzipoor is a writer based in California.