I was educated as a social worker, dealing with people, and my husband worked in technology, designing computer systems for businesses. Because of his business background, every year as a family, we would take a retreat on the first of January to plan our goals for the year.
One year, he said to me, “I see you are always writing out the same information in your reports for the courts.”
He said, “Have you ever thought about how you can work smarter and not harder getting your reports together?”
So, I said, yes, I showed him the template I was using, for me that was working smarter, not harder.
He said, “That’s what I’m talking about.”
He said, “You can design a program to capture that information and generate a report, so you don’t have to write out everything every time.”
I did not know anything about technology, but when he showed me that, I remember the Department of Social Services said we had to start reporting all our information into the federal government. And I was saying to them, I said, “Okay, we can design a system to do this.”
And that’s what I did—a simple system—and it led me into being over a program that was responsible for the computer system that the social workers use now within the state of South Carolina. It was just exciting to be a part of it and to be on the cutting edge.
It also launched me into a new career. Instead of being a social worker, I became a project manager in technology. And so, it was an exciting time, though scary to leave something that was familiar, working with people, to working with systems.
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