When people seek careers in tech, her local nonprofit can train them

Sherri Sims has spent years in technology and consulting, building a career around helping people navigate transitions and find opportunities they may not have thought were possible.

Now the managing director of nonprofit Per Scholas Atlanta, Sims helps people launch IT careers through tuition-free training in fields including IT support, cybersecurity, software engineering, data centers and critical facilities.

Her own path into technology began on Chicago’s South Side, where she said it wasn’t projected for people to really be in high-end IT careers. Then she met someone who told her they made $30,000 working in computer science. “It was the most money I’d ever heard of at the time,” she said. She decided that’s what she wanted to major in.

Sims went on to attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she received a scholarship, and worked internships with Procter & Gamble and GTE, a telecommunications firm. She later spent more than 20 years doing project management for software and consulting organizations.

Along the way, she also started a nonprofit focused on helping young people navigate the transition from high school to college. About five years ago, Sims joined Per Scholas, combining her experience in technology and corporate America with what she calls her love of helping people through the transitions in their lives.

Per Scholas, which is based in the Bronx in New York and now has programs in 25 cities, trains people for technology careers at no cost to the learner. Sims said the organization’s goal is to promote economic mobility by helping people gain technical and professional skills and connect with well-paying jobs.

Edited for length and clarity

Q. Tell me a little bit more about Per Scholas and what its mission is and how it came to be.

A. It started off as an organization that was recycling IT equipment. Companies used to bring their old computers, they would teach people to recycle the computer, and then they would sell them into the community in an effort to give people in the community more access to computers, right? Computers used to be really expensive.

And over the years, they realized that the people they were teaching to recycle the computers, because they had to take them apart … fix them, update the software, that those people were leaving and getting really good jobs. And so we became a workforce development organization that trains people how to do IT. It used to be our bread and butter was IT support. We now do IT support, cybersecurity. We do software engineering. We are integrating AI into all our classes. We’re teaching people how to become data center technicians and critical facilities technicians.

Q. How have you and your team been able to achieve outcomes like that when there’s a lot of programs that might be struggling?

A. There’s two things. One, Per Scholas has a proven system, right? So they’ve been doing this for a long time. We intentionally adjust our curricula, adjust our processes to what’s going on in industry. So we have industry consultants that come in and volunteer their time to look at our curriculum. When we are doing a class, for example, (for jobs) in a data center, we may talk to people who work at a data center to be able to make sure that this is really gonna be a good fit for the job. And then we have a team of people that are really just dedicated to the cause. We focus, especially here in Atlanta, a lot on professionalism. …. We’ve had people that go from throwing boxes at Amazon to being in the Amazon data center. It’s a different environment; it’s a different way you talk; it’s a different way you present yourself. We focus on timeliness; we focus on soft skills.

Q. You mentioned you’ve introduced AI into your curriculum. How have you decided what parts of AI are worth teaching long term that will kind of carry that skill forward, and then how do you integrate that into job readiness?

A. We may have technology classes, but we’re not teaching people, for example, just this technology. What we’re teaching them is how to teach themselves tech.

How to continue and be curious and figure out what’s new, what’s coming and how to use it.

I could teach you, last year, generative AI.

This year, now we’re focusing more on: How do you use AI to be more efficient in your job? But when you leave here, you will continue to be — as a learner, our alumni will continue to be — curious about what’s happening next with AI. … We also have additional classes that we teach for free for our alumni. They can get additional certifications, et cetera. But we started with: What does the job need, right? So originally we thought, oh, the job needs people to use generative AI to just find out things. Now we’re realizing, no, the job wants people to make sure that they are using it for project work or being able to collaborate, being able to debug or compare things to make sure that they’re doing the right thing. Being able to be, like I said, more efficient in whatever role you’re in.

Q. What advice would you give to other women who are leading organizations like yours or trying to get to a point where they are?

A. I think for me, what I’ve learned in my career, so I’ve been in the workforce for more than 30 years. … I did project management for software and consulting organizations for more than 20 years. And I think the big thing is, you gotta find your voice.

It is challenging, I think, in America today, to be able to articulate what you want, articulate what you need and not be seen as loud, overbearing, right? All of the things that come out when a woman disagrees. But when you’re right, you’re right. When you know, you know. And even if you’re not right, you can apologize or correct a mistake.

But not having a voice allows corporate America to make us invisible. And so we have to exert ourselves.

Q. What is a song that you listen to whenever you need a confidence boost?