This IT pro is lifelong learner after pivoting from journalism to tech

South Jersey-based Lukach, 45, is a senior field solutions architect specializing in enterprise networking for information technology company CDW.

Lukach offers technical expertise during the company’s sales process, visiting customer sites and discussing what products and services could upgrade their firm’s tech systems.

But Lukach wasn’t always an IT guy. He pivoted to the industry from communications and journalism after deciding he wanted a more analytical job. In the early 2000s, he said, there weren’t a ton of options for non-traditional tech pathways. He learned on the job in his various roles over the years, as he worked his way up.

In this edition of Technical.ly’s How I Got Here series, Lukach recounts his career pivot and offers advice for young IT professionals. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.

Did you go to school for a tech-related field?

I did not. I went to Shippensburg University. I have a communications/journalism degree. I was gonna be a journalist. I wanted to do music journalism, movie journalism, something along those lines.

What I ended up doing was kind of getting out and taking some copywriting jobs and copy editing jobs and internships and things like that. I worked for a PR firm. I worked in New York City for a marketing firm for a while doing copywriting. And I found my way into IT a little bit later.

How did you become interested in IT?

It started more as a hobby. I was working for a company called Toth in New York City. I would do my PR job. I just got burnt out really quick. I would basically just come home and mess around on my computer all night. And I found that more interesting than, actually, the work I was doing.

I’d said [to myself], “I don’t want to spend the time to get better at the writing gig or the copy editing gig or the public relations gig.” I think I’ve always been more of a better analyst, kind of an analytical mind. In writing or public relations or journalism, you have to have more of an influential mind. And that’s not what I was necessarily either good at or wanted to move forward with. I’m good at taking things apart. I’m good at figuring out how things work, systems, computers, technical stuff. So that’s what I wanted to move forward with.

So how did you make it happen?

One day I said, “You know what, I’m just gonna do this career change.” I don’t have any formal training and never really went to school for it or anything like that. So what I need to do was engross myself as much as I can. I just quit, basically. I took a job teaching during the day, I took some online classes and night classes and stuff like that to get more into the IT stuff, and  just worked my way to a point where I qualified for an entry-level help desk position. That was my first real IT role.

Once I kind of got into IT, it was really just moving into larger roles and working my way up through the ranks of where I saw those opportunities to get better and just move forward.

Where did you take those first classes?

There used to be a computer school that is long gone, called the Chubb Institute. The landscape has very, very much changed with IT training. When I was getting into IT, maybe you lived somewhere where a local community college had some certificate training courses. And then there was a specialized school, like I said, Chubb Institute. So that’s one that I took some classes at, like at night and online.

This was 2003, so online, it was basically a web forum. We didn’t do video calls or anything like that. The resources now are miles and miles beyond what I was dealing with when I was working on it, so it’s good to see how that’s changed. Later on, when I was already working in IT, I took some courses at Camden County College.

What excites you about your current role?

I like solving problems for customers. That’s what I really like. I’ll talk to five or six customers a day on a busy day, and I have to keep all these different environments straight. Every customer has different needs. Every customer has different business goals. And it’s on me and the entire CDW account team to help them achieve that. But it never gets stale. And you’re never looking at the same thing every day, just because there’s just so many varieties and so many different conversations you’re having every day, there’s always something going on.

I like picking apart things and figuring out how they work and I like solving problems. And I think there’s no better environment for that than tech because it’s always changing. There’s always something new I can learn about, there’s always something fresh, and there’s always something new that I can offer to these customers.

What advice do you have for someone just starting an IT career?

I think it’s a matter of learning everything you can quickly. Keep learning things. Don’t get lazy. Pick a job that teaches you something, more than to just pay the bills.

It’s very rare that someone starts in a specialty, you have to have that idea of how all the pieces fit together before you can focus on one individual path. So it’s good to have that broad general knowledge, and then focus in from there.

So start where you can learn everything, understand how all the pieces fit together, learn how all the technology works together as one big solid environment, and then specialize.

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.