Produced by the What Works Media Project and directed by award-winning producer Mikaela Beardsley, and filmmaker Kristi Jacobson, this documentary follows the lives of three young people, two of them Per Scholas graduates, as they prepare for a rapidly changing jobs market. The film beautifully captures the success of these students as they persevere through our intensive curriculum, career coaching, and the job search that follows, and highlights the dedication that the Per Scholas staff gives to this organization every single day.

Produced by the What Works Media Project and directed by award-winning producer Mikaela Beardsley, and filmmaker Kristi Jacobson, this documentary follows the lives of three young people, two of them Per Scholas graduates, as they prepare for a rapidly changing jobs market. The film beautifully captures the success of these students as they persevere through our intensive curriculum, career coaching, and the job search that follows, and highlights the dedication that the Per Scholas staff gives to this organization every single day.

In 1995, Per Scholas got its start by collecting used computers and recycling them to give to families and schools. There was even a retail store operated out of the Bronx, NY office which sold and repaired discounted tech equipment. As Per Scholas’ mission shifted from refurbishing computers to opening doors to technology careers, its asset recovery efforts changed too.

“We’ve consistently adjusted and improved our process for the better, in response to numerous industry requirements and specific client needs,” says ZuQuan Rooks, Director of Social Ventures.

Today, Per Scholas partners with a handful of vetted and highly-qualified recyclers to outsource its IT asset recovery services. The e-Steward, R2 and ISO-certified recycler Liquid Technology, has become a Champion Partner of the organization. Six years ago, Liquid Technology began hiring Per Scholas graduates and donating computer hardware, which led to a positive and mutually-beneficial relationship.

“Liquid Technology is highly pivotal in delivering this important business solution to many of our client-partners,” Rooks says. “Any revenue generated from valuable retired hardware goes toward our important social mission. We proudly share with our partners the specific impact of their material support and use of our asset recovery services.”

Brenda Rodriguez, Manager of Social Ventures, handles communications with clients, coordinates logistics, and manages Per Scholas’ relationship with recycling partners, such as Liquid Technology. “We’ve had to become more selective about which donations we are able to accept,” Brenda says about all the donation offers she gets on a daily basis. She adds, “Although any donation offers are appreciated, not all are beneficial to our mission.” We are careful to ensure that the related costs inherent with their collection do not outweigh the value and volume of the donated equipment.”

On behalf of Per Scholas, Liquid Technology audits, tests and re-markets any hardware that has residual value, and recycles all obsolete hardware in an environmentally-responsible manner. When it comes to the recycling of retired tech equipment, Eric DeRosa, Director of Sales, Liquid Technology, rhetorically adds, “Since responsible e-waste management is a bonafide business solution which companies are legally required to do anyway, why not make sure it’s performed in a compliant manner and supports a good cause?”

Since industry standards and requirements for legal compliance have grown tremendously, Per Scholas urges companies to put their hardware in highly-qualified hands. Fox Sports, Mastercard International, Ford Foundation, IRS, Montefiore Medical Systems, Queens Library System and Amazon.com, among others, have trusted Per Scholas with the handling of their retired IT assets.

Last year Liquid Technology, among others, helped Per Scholas recycle 139,490 pounds of equipment. That’s 732,581 total pounds of carbon emissions that were prevented from entering Earth’s atmosphere. That’s equivalent to 1,061,712 plastic bottles!

Although Per Scholas administrates its asset recovery business out of its New York office, the Social Ventures team works with and constantly seeks national and global clientele. If your company would like Per Scholas to collect and process its retired tech equipment to directly benefit motivated, yet under-served technology students, please email ZuQuan Rooks at [email protected] for more information.

“I was so inspired by Per Scholas, it has impacted my life so much. It even impacted me emotionally, because when you go through a storm, and all of our storms are different, the impact is the same. You start to feel less than. You start to feel like you’re not worth anything. You start to see life from the darker side.” 

“I think Per Scholas shed a light on my life emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, so much so that I re-enrolled in school for IT. I currently have an associates degree in IT, and I’m continuing to pursue my bachelors in computer science. Per Scholas has played a key role in where I currently am. I’m thankful that my salary has surpassed where I was before. I was able to buy a house and pay off some debt. We’re still a work in progress, but my family has definitely felt the impact of Per Scholas.”      

Thank you to our local and national partners in Dallas and our local advisory board members who have paved the way for informed curriculum, local hiring networks, and relationships that allow our graduates to thrive in the industry.

A perfect example of a determined Per Scholas Graduate is Greg Finnell. Greg is the person in the family that can fix anything. “I am kind of like a jack of all trades,” he says. “If a computer was broken, or a router was not working — I was the guy my family would call on to fix it.”

Born and raised in Texas, Greg moved to Houston to pursue a degree in Business Management. Greg says he understood that a degree would provide him flexibility, but he had trouble sitting through classes, and with the increasing cost of education he decided to leave after earning his Associate’s Degree.

Greg spent a period of time working in a low wage customer service job. After hearing comments that “without a four year degree, it would be hard to find more advanced positions.” Greg realized that “I didn’t want to be working next to a fifteen year-old kid who would be making the same wages as me, and that’s when I started looking into certifications. I knew that technical jobs paid more than customer service.”

Like many students, Greg thought that Per Scholas was fake: “I thought it was a lie – but then I thought – if it is true then it can’t hurt.” Greg enrolled in Per Scholas’ entry level IT Support course and earned himself an A+ Certification. After 10 weeks of training he was immediately hired as a Help Desk Support for a technology consulting firm and doubled his yearly income. Greg says, “after I got my A+ certification, it opened up the door for me it, it was life changing and put a fire under me and made me start studying and working even harder.”

Greg continued to work nighttime Monday through Thursday from 8pm-7am, and took another job on the weekends at the baggage claim with American Airlines on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. On his own time he studied for additional certifications, earning three in January and February, and eventually earning his Net+ certification in March.

During that period, Per Scholas reached out to alumni about a new training opportunity with Platform by Per Scholas, a customized training track teaching an Application Support Management course in Dallas. This was a perfect upskilling opportunity for Greg, and offered customer solutions training, project management skills and advanced coding knowledge, all skills he needed in order to advance in the industry. He enrolled in the course, and continued to work nights and weekends. “It was a challenging time, and I did not have much sleep, but I was going to succeed. My dream is to make six figures in my lifetime to support myself, my partner and my family.”

Platform by Per Scholas upskills individuals with previous backgrounds in technology. Greg was able to leverage his IT Support course and working experience at Cognizant to begin learning new skills including several coding languages. “Platform was teaching new information that opened the door for my career. Companies in Dallas are trying to re-train their current employees on new languages and technologies that Platform is already teaching. All of these companies are moving towards ITIL languages, skills I had already learned at Platform.”

Before graduation, Greg was contacted by a hiring team from Southwest Airlines. Within a week he was hired as a Senior Service Desk Technician at $28/hr, nearly three times the salary he was earning before he found Per Scholas. “They found my resume online, noticed that I was going for multiple certifications, that I was a hard worker and that I wanted to continue to learn, and they hired me just like that.”

When asked about the future Greg says “I really like the technical side of these jobs. It gives me a lot of energy and I want to continue to grow. I have a love for travel and like seeing new places. I’ve got some great trips planned for myself and my partner– Paris, Rome and London are on the list!”

I grew up in Guyana with my parents, my brother and my sister. As a family, we were taught that you don’t take anything for granted. Resources were important to us, and while I wouldn’t say I grew up in poverty, my moral compass has been driven by an awareness of the access to resources and learning opportunities that I’ve had in my life.

As a kid, I was very curious about everything. My parents did not consider my sister or myself as “normal”. We were under two years apart and we loved to experiment with anything we could get our hands on. I was seven years old when my parents got me my first Lego set, a tropical island with coconut trees and beaches that I would build over and over again. It was the first and only leggo set I ever received as a child, and it taught me that I loved to be active with my hands.

From then on, I started taking everything apart. The problem was, unlike the lego set, I never knew how to put things back together. My house was an 80s household, 80s pop culture was dominant almost everywhere. There was a song in the 80s called Midas Touch that my father sang, “everything you touch turns to gold.” My father would joke that I was the “anti- midas touch.” Everything I touched seemed to end in pieces. The stereos we had at home- I would break them apart because I was curious what was inside. The fact that I couldn’t put them back together did not bother me, but it drove my parents nuts. This was the case for record players, speakers, computers. At age ten my parents decided to start locking away all of the electronic equipment in our house so I couldn’t get my hands on it.

My parents decided to move to the United States when I was thirteen. They moved to the Bronx so that there would be more opportunities for me and my sister. It was a major decision for our family because they were both successful back home, but like many Per Scholas students, they were determined to find opportunities for our family.

In college, I chose to major in Finance and in my second year I began my first professional job in the banking industry. I was a part time teller, promoted to a personal banker and then operations manager. I was then presented with a unique opportunity to open my own financial center, and at age twenty-two, I had a staff of ten and was responsible for everything in the branch. I felt fortunate being so young to have opportunities to effectively manage people, learn to manage my own time and coach my staff to perform even better. But when the market crashed in 2008 the bank I managed was bought by JPMorgan. I worked under them for a few years before being laid off. I had a few options, but I had reached a point where I was not passionate about banking, and coupled with the stress I decided I wanted to start working with my hands again and that meant technology. 

I knew I had to be certified so I started looking for the fastest way to get my foot in the door and earn certifications. While searching, I stumbled on Per Scholas and enrolled in a fifteen week training to earn my A+ and MCTS (Microsoft Office) certifications. That course was amazing for me, and I pushed myself to succeed. It made the things I did when I was younger more of a reality. But I also realized, that the skills I was learning would not be enough to sustain my entire career. At some point, these skills would be obsolete, and though I was excited to be learning, I realized that I needed to continue to learn and grow at every step in the process.

After graduation, I was presented the opportunity to work for the organization full time. I didn’t want to turn it down, there was a part of me that felt gratitude to Pe Scholas, an organization giving folks this unique opportunity to find meaningful careers. I was hired onto the Admissions team in 2012, and when I started there was no electronic system in place to intake applicants info. We used a filing cabinet that was not alphabetized and could take up to 30 minutes to find a student’s information.

I thought: there must be a better way to organize this material and encouraged the shift for the organization to Google Suite. I started exploring the capabilities of the platform and built an electronic Google form that staff could input student data into a spreadsheet. I continued to work on these types of projects, building systems that would help optimize the work of our program staff and make us a more efficient organization.

After about six months, word got around about the work I was doing and I was tasked to create an online database that would house all of our policies and procedures. This was my first opportunity to work on a national project and I advanced into a new role as Program Operations Manager.

In late 2012 we made the decision to adopt Salesforce as a Customer Relationship Management Tool and I was given another opportunity to project manage the pilot and rollout to staff. I was excited to be working with a data management platform and back to a lot of the skills I had learned in my IT Support class. I was building processes within a tech landscape, developing applications for Salesforce that were customized for our organization and the company gave me confidence to administer the platform — with every new project my skill set grew and grew and grew.  

The first major policy I wrote for the organization was a data use and security policy that still exists today. In addition, I embarked on a project to partner with an external software firm for the companies first Intranet to support a growing national organization.

If there is one great thing I can say about this role is that I have fulfilled my passion for technology- and I continue to fulfill it, however, I’ve also been able to partner with teammates on non-tech initiatives. Performance management is one example where I’ve helped my team members think through how we can use tech to accomplish goals relating to culture or communications.

In my new role as a Salesforce Developer at MDRC I’ll be asked to architect their data models which means creating the blueprint for the ways they manage and report out on data. MDRC is all about research, and they are the gold standard in their industry. I feel like I can add value to their team because I have confidence and a deep understanding of the workforce landscape. From my own experience, from the experience on the Per Scholas admissions team and working on Information Systems for a provider partner, I’ll be able to understand the pain points and limitations of many of the partners that MDRC works alongside. I know right off the bat that there will be projects that I will be thrown into that I am not a master yet, which is one of the reasons I wanted to pursue this challenge.

I am sad to leave Per Scholas. I will miss the people that I’ve worked with who are some of the most amazing individuals that I’ve had the opportunity to know. The people at Per Scholas have helped me grow professionally and personally in so many ways. I am grateful for the trust that the organization has had in my capabilities and I am excited to continue to grow and contribute in this next phase of my career.

Last month, Per Scholas’ Managing Director for Atlanta, Jasmine Miller, sat down with NPR affiliate WABE’s Rose Scott to talk about diversity in technology, and the work of growing representation for women and minorities in the field. The two were joined by Erika Shackleford, a Per Scholas graduate, for a conversation that explored the organization’s mission to bring technology trainings and career opportunities to often-overlooked communities nationwide.

 “We have a huge challenge here, locally and nationally, to really move towards helping these companies diversify the tech industry,” said Ms. Miller. “We want to make sure that the folks who are coming through our training are going to be successful, because it’s not just about training for us. It really is about helping them build a career in IT, so we partner with corporations, and we move these folks into jobs.”

“I like technology just because it’s a vast field. It’s not just one thing you can focus on… It’s an open space and you can find what you love,” Said Ms. Shackelford of the opportunities available to her since training with Per Scholas. Having found her passion, she hopes to pass on what she has learned. “Eventually I want to pay it forward, and start teaching people how to code.”

To hear the full story, head over to WABE’s website. The feature on Per Scholas begins at the 40-minute mark.

The Cognizant Knowledge Sharing Series is an excellent example of the resources and experience employer partners can offer students. Several weeks ago Nitil Kamal, a Client Service Executive at Cognizant, spent a Saturday with Platform students in New York to discuss big data and artificial intelligence trends in the insurance market. Mr. Kamal elevated case studies where big data analysis and smart computer programming can expand business possibilities across a range of sectors. The conversation focused on the impact data analytics can have on profit margins and systems that have been designed to leverage data effectively within a corporation. Specifically, in the insurance business, data analysts are able to predict human and market behavior to determine fraudulent claims. Mr. Kamal commented that he was “very impressed by the technology acumen and intellectual gradient of the students at Platform by Per Scholas.”

“The deep experience and knowledge of the IT industry is probably the biggest asset our partners at Cognizant can provide students,” Judge commented after the day-long conversation. “There are plenty of tech boot-camps popping up in the city, but our main focus is the direct input and feedback loops from one of the most successful employers in the world. Our students are getting face-time with executives and technical teams, and each course module has been identified as a top priority by a hiring partner.”

The knowledge sharing series continues on Tuesday, May 8th, with a visit from Morgan Luniewicz, Consulting Security Engineer with Fortinet. The conversation will examine the software tools and developer knowledge necessary to enter the field.

To read more about Cognizant’s support of Per Scholas, click here. To apply to Platform by Per Scholas’ customized training tracks in New York and Dallas, click here.