By Wendy Buck
At the age of five, my eldest daughter is a budding expert on dinosaurs. She loves regaling me with facts about them. She loves asking big questions about them. Most of all, she loves reading about them. And in this respect, she is a chip off the old block, because growing up, I was also a voracious reader.
In due course, I turned my hand to writing, too, taking AP English classes and getting good grades for my short stories. I discovered one of the cardinal rules of storytelling: show, don’t tell. Because, as my pint-size paleontologist understands very well, it’s one thing to tell your reader that T. Rex was big; it’s another thing entirely to describe for them a monster the size of a school bus whose bite could crush a car!
As an adult, I took my love of storytelling and made a career out of it. After majoring in communications and completing a master’s degree in the subject, I wound up working in marketing, first for a software trade association and then for a company offering software as a service. With such dazzling tech on display, it would have been easy just to rattle off lists of features and statistics and call it a day. But I was determined to dig deeper. Who was using the software? How had it improved the way they worked? At the trade association, I managed an awards program, and at the software company I curated a series of case studies of our customers (and now that I think about it, the latter was not a million miles from this blog series). In both cases, I wanted to showcase the human stories behind the tech.
After that, I came to Revature, and I soon discovered that, for a storyteller, every day working here is like finding buried treasure. The reason is simple: this company is all about people. Our mission is to provide opportunities in the tech industry regardless of race, financial means, college major, geography, or gender. This is not just a valuable service: it’s a fountain of uplifting stories!
We have helped workers go from bagging groceries to coding for Fortune 500 companies in a matter of months. We have helped college grads who had previously been rejected from literally hundreds of jobs because they didn’t attend the “right” school or pursue the “right” degree path. We have helped military veterans who aspire to a second career in technology following their service.
At Revature, we are not just telling people how much we care about diversity and opportunity. We are showing them, by helping to launch their careers. For example, the tech industry is notoriously male-dominated. But shortly after I started here, I went up to New York City to meet with a new cohort of associates, all of whom turned out to be women. I knew right then this was the place for me!
Since becoming a mom, I feel even more strongly the need to elevate people, to give them a chance to shine. I’m still writing stories—mostly stories about being a parent, which I share to help other people in my situation. And these days, I’m practicing “show don’t tell” in a whole new way. Because I want my three daughters to know that you can be a good mother and have a successful career. But it’s not enough just to say that. By leaning into my work and my family life, I’m showing them!