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Until recently, Lanyia Brooks worked as a custodian in a data center, where she spent her days maintaining the facility while watching tech professionals build the infrastructure around her.
Brooks said that perspective changed completely when a data center technician noticed her work ethic and remarked that she “worked too hard to be just working as a custodian,” and sent her a link to a specialized career training program. Despite waiting two anxious months to hear back, Brooks was accepted, conquering her fears to take her very first airplane flight to Indianapolis for the opportunity.
One week into the intensive program, Brooks says she is thriving in a high-energy environment alongside a deeply positive and ambitious cohort of classmates. “My immediate goal is to master my training and learning the ins and outs of physical servers and networking - with long-term plans to transition into an advanced technician role within a year,” she said.
Backed by supportive instructors and employer-provided accommodations, Brooks said, “This opportunity is my direct path to achieving the American dream.”
Ethan Blake didn’t have to fly to get here, but he said that he felt just as stuck working in retail sales with little opportunity to move up. “I felt a growing desire to move beyond customer service and explore my true interest in technology,” he said.
Despite the 26-year-old’s efforts to break into the field, Blake said he hit a discouraging wall when searching for local employment and faced the daunting reality that his only visible career paths required relocating across the country to tech hubs such as California.
“This workplace training program provided the critical local bridge I needed and bypassed the need to relocate and unlocked a clear career in the industry that will drive the future of this country,” Blake told the Washington Examiner.
Born in Haiti and raised in Florida, 31-year-old Anne Lubin found her true sense of place in Indiana, where she spent nearly a year immersed in an intensive cybersecurity and information assurance associate program at Ivy Tech Community College. While her academic foundation gave her a strong grasp of digital security, Lubin said she realized that she needed tangible, hands-on experience to break into the tech sector.
“When I discovered Meta’s America’s Workforce Academy, I instantly jumped at the opportunity. The program provides the perfect marriage between my cyber background and the physical world of fiber optics and allows me to navigate both worlds,” she said.
As a proud member of the very first cohort at the Indiana pilot site, Lubin views her training as a profound opportunity to fulfill the American dream and establish a blueprint for future generations of tech workers.
“This journey is deeply rooted in human connection and has given me the opportunity to welcome peers from across the country,” Lubin said.
The first wave of students has formed a real bond, organizing poker games at their hotel and fostering a tight-knit community out of the strangers who left their families behind for a shared purpose.
Mike Rowe, the “Dirty Jobs” host and mikeroweWORKS Foundation CEO, has spent 15 years pushing this exact vision. “Who was it? Hemingway? I forget who said it, but things happen very slowly and then suddenly,” he says of the shift in how Americans think about vocational work and the success of Meta’s launch of America’s Workforce Academy.
Rowe doesn’t take credit for launching AWA, a skilled trades initiative Meta unveiled in June under President and Vice Chairwoman Dina Powell McCormick. He frames his role as more of a witness than an architect - but the 15 years his foundation has spent quietly awarding work-ethic scholarships laid the groundwork for exactly this kind of large-scale, private-sector intervention.
For Rowe, dignified work isn’t about pay or perks. “Shouldn’t dignified work really come down to work that blesses someone else?” he said. “There has to be something about effort that’s more noble when it builds up the community.”