It’s never too late to learn something new

Hello blogonerds, my name is Antonio Galvan aka Ant I am a 39-year-old who has had a career in social services for the past 15 years. A new career was and is somewhat of a scary idea. Last year I started thinking I really wanted to do something different with my career and I could no longer stay at my current job. For 8 years I had been a special care transition specialist for the state of New Mexico. You might be asking what that is? Well, I will tell you. My old job was advocating for the elderly to be able to transition back into the community as safe as possible with the services they required. This was no easy task as it involved strongly advocating with insurance companies and fighting for seniors entitlements the insurance companies needed to provide for my clients.

After 8 years I became a great advocate for my senior population in New Mexico. I loved seeing their faces when they received their new apartments well furnished and with the services they needed to be more independent. One of many things I loved about my old job was fighting the insurance companies and them saying they didn’t have the budget for such things. Oh boy, let me tell you, it was a fight at the start of my career against these soulless creatures but at the end of the day, they would somehow magically find the budget for what was being asked of them to provide my clients. After eight years and them knowing I would fight for my client’s tooth and nail they would simply just comply and do what I asked of them which was great for my clients. Many times they tried to recruit me but as I told my supervisor at the time, you need not worry about me leaving my job as I will never work for the Darkside. This all began to change in 2020 and change in a really big and unfortunate way.

When COVID hit, things changed drastically. Clients were afraid of leaving the nursing homes and decided to stay. Many of my clients began to die from this awful virus. My mental health took a turn for the worse, and I was not doing well at all. I was in a really bad place. Thankfully I had people who would encourage me to stay the course and things would change. For about one year things didn’t change, clients kept on dying and my caseload started to get smaller and smaller. My caseload went from 35+ cases to about 2 active cases which were really not active as they were waiting for things to change. As I mentioned before I have always been interested in tech as a teen even as an adult. I was the office’s unofficial IT guy. I once asked my help desk for them to just give me the credentials so I can complete the tasks needed at my office as I could probably get the job done much faster than they could. This did not sit well with them and were verbally reprimanded for asking this of the IT department. I figured they would love the idea since then they wouldn’t have to deal with our office and I could just take care of any issues.

Thankfully I have a few people in my life who have been great motivators for me to leave my job and start moving towards a career in tech. I am only getting started but I hope this will soon be a journey of a lifetime.