Laura Buckley has faced hardships: After six years as a senior clerk at a digital media firm, her employer eliminated her position in a round of cutbacks. Around the same time, she discovered she was pregnant. Soon Laura became a single mother who needed to earn an income for herself and her new baby boy. During maternity leave, she drove a school bus and later worked at a convenience store. However, Laura wanted a chance to rebuild her professional career and achieve new heights.
In fall of 2019, Laura learned of an opportunity to take Salesforce’s ADM 201 Certification course without any cost through IDRF and The Rainbow Cloud Initiative. The program that helps Canadians struggling with unemployment. The week-long course teaches people Customer Relationship Management (CRM) skills and prepares them to work at one of the 150,000 businesses that use Salesforce’s cloud-based software. Laura successfully applied to the program with hopes to rejuvenate her career. While she attended classes and practiced her digital skills her mother took care of her son.
Career success comprises of many factors. One of them is resilience. Laura learned a lot in the course and made strong connections with others in her position. However, she failed the mandatory certification exam twice. Failure is a part of life that many struggles to accept, especially Laura, who is ambitious and hard-working. When she wrote the Salesforce certification exam a third time, she passed.
“On the third try, when I pressed submit and I had seen passed my whole world just changed because FINALLY, after all this hard work, I was successful!”
Laura’s journey did not end there; her next goal was to secure a full-time position. The Salesforce training program invites guest speakers in leadership positions to motivate and educate participants and one of them connected Laura to a consulting firm that hired her as a Salesforce Administrator in March 2020. Eight months later TD Bank offered Laura a role as a Salesforce CRM Manager and she accepted the position. It came with a significant salary increase, opportunities to develop her career and perhaps most importantly, prosperity for her and her son.
#IDRF #CanadianPrograms #WomeninTech #RainbowCloudInitiative #Salesforce