Many Paths, Many Destinations

Over the holiday break, my folks and I took a road trip from Dallas, TX all the way to Buffalo, NY to visit with our extended family. I have always found that the ability to travel the world is an amazing privilege that has the potential to create the most fulfilling experiences. There were areas where we were intentional; for instance, a planned trip to Graceland to see Elvis’ home decked out in Christmas lights. Others were a happenstance. Over a coffee, my son peered through the window and recognized the Lorraine Motel, the site of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination; this lead to an insightful, unplanned trip to the National Civil Rights Museum, where I was grateful for the opportunity to pay respect to Dr. King and the freedom fighters he worked with to help secure a just, equal society. It was amazing to be reminded how far we’ve come, and how much more we still have left to do.

At the Academy, as in my personal life, some events were deliberate, while others were happenstance. Nearly two years ago, Divergence Academy shifted to a remote (distance learning) model because of the pandemic. Far from a deliberate strategic priority. However, the investments we made in 2021 to make remote learning great, have resulted in greater opportunities for our students.

?Learning from feedback and applying the best of our lessons from the COVID-19 epidemic were a net positive for all of us at Divergence. I couldn’t be prouder of my team and all their accomplishments. Our journey required perseverance and resilience to meet our goal, to help our students to accomplish happier and healthier livelihoods. Despite many long days and weeks, we more than accomplished our task of talent placements.

Here is a list of our 2021 achievements –?

A.?????Graduations

1.?????Graduated 488 students, 60% placed in Cybersecurity, 75% in Data Science

2.?????Graduated Cybersecurity Operations Technician and Business Intelligence / Data Analyst Technician apprentices?

B.?????Recognitions

3.?????Ranked 556 on the Inc 5000 in 2021’s faster growing private companies

4.?????Received a HireVETS Gold Medallion from Department from Labor for hiring a bigger number of Veterans into Divergence Academy

5.?????Authored and launched a book, Hackers and Heroes: How Everyone can Participate in the Tech Economy, in November 2021

C.????Product & Program Development (Innovation)

6.?????Released two new programs released: Cloud Engineering Immersive, and Security Operations Management Immersive

7.?????Continued to innovate our Paid-internship program called Bowsprit.?

8.?????Increased our Employer network by over 200 companies.

D.????New Funding options added

9.?????Veteran Rapid Retraining Assistance Program (VRRAP) funding method added

10. Moved to a new Income Share Agreement Provider (Leif)?

What’s Next

?We are working on Talent solutions to make it easy for our Employer Partners to receive our graduates into the in-demand jobs in Information Technology.?

1.?????Co-paid Internships

2.?????Apprenticeships

3.?????Hire-Certify-Deploy?

4.?????Train to Hire

?On the training side, we are in the development stages for the Network Engineering and Software Engineering Immersive programs.

?Final Thoughts

?I think in the yet to be defined “new normal”, people have many different ideas about how to end the pandemic. I have heard the word “endemic” i.e., SARS-COVID19 will become flu-like and that we will learn to live with it. The Future of Work and the Future of Education are shape shifting as I write this. I believe that the foundational work – strategies and philosophies - for the future economic opportunities are being developed by every organization across the world. Over the next 5 years, we will have many paths and many destinations. In the relational data model, many-to-many table relationships are resolved through a Junction table. We do not have a Junction yet.

While the pandemic continues, we can do more than passively hope the vaccine will allow life to return to normal. If we come to see long commitment to doing what is valuable, we can see that even now we are still on the complex journey that gives Divergence Academy the true purpose of helping every student with career transitions with intentional strategies. We reserve the right to keep the memorable emergent outcomes too.?

?We at Divergence Academy wish all our instructors, learners and employer partners the very best of 2022. May we all continue to do our part to leave this world a brighter place than we found it.