After getting a bachelor’s degree in information systems and looking for a job for two years, Fidel Peters began working as a driver at The Brooklyn Hospital Center, delivering meals and transporting specimens and medications from the various offsite clinics affiliated with the hospital. Occasionally, he would drive IT leaders to and from meetings and used that as an opportunity to speak to a couple of people about his interest in an IT job.
Peters also had a champion in his supervisor, who knew where his real passion resided and went to bat for Peters, going to IT himself. “He mentioned that ‘I have a great employee and I hate to lose him, but he’s qualified to work here,’ so he put in a good word for me,” Peters recalls. That led to an interview and then a job on the hospital’s IT help desk in 2014.
About a month later, Peters was offered a job with a newly formed business intelligence group and his primary responsibility was to deploy a new web reporting tool.
Today, Peters, who is the hospital’s business intelligence manager, may not have had to wait so long to find an IT job. The oft-cited IT talent shortage has left CIOs and other leaders scrambling to fill the skills gap as they continue escalating their digital transformation initiatives. One key way to do so is upskilling internal staff.
