It’s a modern spin on “take your child to work day.”
For Sherrie Hill and her son Kavary of Woodbridge, it was mother and son taking each other to a pre-apprenticeship program at Germanna Community College.
The pair spent the past four weeks in an intensive training program with Amazon Web Services designed to prepare them for the careers that build, connect, power, and operate the information infrastructure, such as data centers, proliferating across the Fredericksburg area.
The Hills were part of the first cohort of 20 students at Germanna to complete the AWS Information Infrastructure Pre-Apprenticeship program (I2PA), a four-week program that Amazon recently launched in Virginia, Mississippi, and Ohio.
Amazon has invested $35 billion in the region to create data centers in Spotsylvania, Caroline, Stafford, and Louisa counties. That investment includes preparing a workforce to build, operate, and maintain the infrastructure surrounding those facilities. The students trained in the Germanna program were chosen and paid by Amazon Web Services.
“We started here because this is where we’re going to build infrastructure,” says Nick Lee-Romagnolo, AWS principal workforce development director. “There is a challenge with having people who can run a data center when there is no data center yet. They don’t have the skills … So, the idea is to give people exposure to the entire information infrastructure.”
While the program doesn’t specifically train the students to work in data centers, it offers them a look at all the elements required to build and run one.
“All the skilled trades, the entire construction industry, anything you would think about for any large critical facility to be built—those are the skills we need,” Lee-Romagnolo says.
Sherrie Hill was already a Germanna student with an AWS cloud certification and some experience in JavaScript when she learned about the new I2PA program.
“My son and I kind of lucked out with both getting into the program together,” says Sherrie. “I wanted to join the new AWS infrastructure program because it was an opportunity to further my skills.”
She admits being excited and a little intimidated at first because of her age and being a woman, “but everyone was so nice, and the instructors were amazing. We built a team atmosphere, and it was wonderful.”
Her 25-year-old son Kavary was already working in the HVAC industry when his mom encouraged him to join the program with her.
“It just caught my interest. My mom knows what I want to do and knew this would be the right path for me,” he says. “Once I saw the other programs, I fell in love with all of it. The fiber splicing was really appealing to me.”
Graduates are encouraged to find a specific pathway to pursue at the conclusion of the program. Both of the Hills felt confident they would soon be able to put their new skills to work.
“I believe that we can get hired very fast—whether it be me or my mom first,” says Kavary. “That’s the goal, right?”