Some people head into their careers knowing exactly what they want to do. Jason… not so much. 

Starting as a fourth and fifth grade teacher, Jason found that the classroom simply wasn’t what he’d expected. After his position was eliminated in 2016, Jason took the opportunity to join a university IT department as a Help Desk Support Specialist. There, he learned more than he could’ve possibly imagined he would in such a short time. Thanks to his coworkers and mentor, Jason was able to find his passions were server side. 

Upon leaving his help desk position, Jason joined a marketing company as a Systems Support Technician. There, he learned that the physical side of servers weren’t all they were cracked up to be. However, the learning picked up in this position enabled him to start doing his own web development projects, taking his initial exploration of front end development into a new stage.

His newly realized itch for development needed tending. Jason began pursuing a job that would allow him to grow as a developer and after initially applying for a Junior WordPress Developer position, he was grabbed by the Training team as a dual-role Trainer, Developer. However, upon learning of Jason’s expertise on the backend and affinity for picking up new skills, the role was quickly adjusted, making Jason the Training team’s Full-Stack Developer.

Over the three years in his current role, Jason has learned the depth that WordPress has available to it but continued to explore development outside of the tools that WordPress makes available. In the future, Jason is looking to grow his skills outside of WordPress, currently pursuing React.js and Laravel as potential next steps. Additionally, Jason would like to take the lessons he learned in the classroom and take them into a role where he is able to lead a team in order to better serve his department and leverage all of his abilities.