MEET CLAIRE OLIVER
Age: 30
Hometown: Jacksonville, FL/Bentonville, AR
Apprenticeship: Rocket Software, NextGen Academy
MY BACK STORY
I say that my hometown is split right down the middle between Jacksonville, Florida, and Bentonville, Arkansas—but I was born in Philadelphia. When I was growing up, we moved pretty frequently: Philadelphia; Dusseldorf, Germany; Jacksonville; Northwest Arkansas. My dad was a sales representative for Johnson & Johnson, so we moved all over the place for the first couple of years. Then we landed in Jacksonville and lived there for about nine years, and that’s where I did the bulk of my growing up. We moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, when I was 14, and we’ve been here ever since. So Florida had the formative years and Arkansas has had my growing-up years.
I have three siblings, an older sister and two younger brothers, so I’m right in the middle. My mom was a stay-at-home mom until I was about 15, when she started working in Catholic Mission work at the local Mercy Hospital. So as her kids were all getting older, I’ve been able to watch her go seek her Master’s degree in Catholic theology in a healthcare setting. Watching her decide that she wanted to make a huge career shift and do something different was really inspiring. My dad also made a big change: From pharmaceutical sales, he’s actually transitioned to being an AP computer science teacher for the local high school. He and I both made the swap into tech at the exact same time.
When I was young, I thought I was going to be a pediatric orthopedic therapist. I was convinced that that’s what I wanted to get into. And then, because I taught swim lessons to about 150 kids when I was a little older, I found that I loved the “aha” moments of the kids’ understanding things. A couple of the children were special needs kids, and seeing the benefits of swimming and light physical therapy on them was amazing. And for a while I thought that might be my career path….
MY EDUCATION (Part One)
After graduating from Bentonville High School in 2014, I went to the U of A at Fayetteville and took an anatomy class and discovered that…I hate anatomy. I was pretty squeamish when it came to those dissections, so I switched over to social work because I loved helping people—social work is all about confronting someone’s problem and figuring out how to fix it. But after a couple of years, something still didn’t feel right. And I decided I needed to figure out what I really wanted to do.
MY WORK LIFE (Part One)
So I dropped out of college and did volunteer work with HARK NWA, a Rogers-based nonprofit that helps people in need connect to resources in the area. This organization got started because some people in Northwest Arkansas got together and said, “Our kids are not coming to school ready to learn. There is something going on….” So they hired statisticians and social workers and teachers and did this massive community outreach, and what they came up with is, “We’re a resource-rich area with all of these ways to help people, but nobody’s getting to them. People are falling through the cracks, the application processes are too difficult, and we are creating barriers to care for people.” So HARK was born as essentially a Google search engine for resources.
Let’s say I need help with my electricity bill, and they say, “Okay, great. We can help you with your electricity bill.” But the reality is that if I can’t pay my electricity, I also probably can’t pay my rent and I’m having trouble getting food. Those other bills are probably also problematic, but only one resource can help with one thing. So what HARK does is connect you to all of the resources and then give you a social worker for free who will help walk you through those processes. Watching the impact that they’ve had on Northwest Arkansas has been nothing short of amazing. They were using technology for social work. That was the start for me.
During 2020, with COVID changing everything, I watched HARK go from a small community resource just getting their foot in the door to paying rent for huge swathes of people in NWA and making sure that they had care. It was immediate mobilization. So I started thinking, If I want to help people, as our society is shifting towards technology, I’ll have a wider reach if I just switch to technology. At the time, it felt like an insane career pivot, but that’s how we ended up where we are today.
MY EDUCATION (Part two)
So I went back to school and switched to a major in computer science with a minor in social work. I was a teacher’s assistant over a couple of summers, and then did an online contractor job, training A.I. models. I received my degree in May 2025.
MY TURNAROUND MOMENT
About a month after I graduated, the reality of today’s job market was starting to really set in. Even though I had gotten comfortable with rejection emails, my panic was rising. Then in June of 2025 as I was driving to Chicago to visit some family members, I got a LinkedIn message from Josh Craig at Rocket Software. He had seen my profile and was asking if I could send him over my resumé. Fortunately, I just happened to have a copy with me.
So we started working through the process and I accepted the job offer in August of 2025. I started at Rocket Software a couple of months after that.
MY APPRENTICESHIP
I began as a member of the 30-person cohort of Rocket’s NextGen Academy, an intensive six-month program in which they introduce us to the concepts of software engineering, mainframe fundamentals, security, and so on. We got some agile training. Basically, they give you six months of how to be a professional software developer.
On my very first day at the Academy, I was so nervous. I’m a sucker for journaling, so I wrote myself a letter, and I said, “You’re going to read this letter at the end of NextGen and you’re going to laugh about how nervous you were.” I just finished up in March, so I got to read my letter. And I think one of my biggest takeaways is how much my confidence has changed. In that preliminary letter, I talked so much about worrying about how I would get along with peers, whether or not I’d understand the information, am I able to compete in this field—really leaning into some heavy imposter syndrome! And I’m so happy now because I know I don’t have to be the most confident person in the room, but I do have to know that I’ve put in the work and the effort to understand the things.
Apprenticely’s supervision to make sure we were getting the right hands-on training was very important. An apprenticeship can mean anything. You can be the person getting the coffee, or you can be the person writing the entire code base, and there’s no way to tell which one you’re going to be. So having Apprenticely monitoring the requirements was amazing. Now, seeing how much I’ve grown, with my ability to walk into a room and say, “I know my stuff and I’m here to talk about it”—that’s been so very rewarding. I’ve really enjoyed that part.
MY WORK LIFE NOW
In March, at the end of the six-month program, I became a Sales Engineer 1. If you’re in tech sales, you really need the engineering if you’re going to be able to explain it to people who need to buy it. I’m working with Fortune 500 companies and pretty much anybody that’s on a mainframe. Any of you reading this, you’ll probably be hearing from me at some point because I have something I want to sell you.
It’s only been a couple of weeks, but I would say the job is going well. In meetings, I get to offer input on how we’re approaching training—it’s been really rewarding seeing that my input isn’t only encouraged, but is actively wanted. That’s been super cool to experience. But a lot of what I’m also doing right now is learning about benefits and all of the adult stuff that comes with these jobs that I haven’t had access to before. Setting up a 401k has been fun.
MY CAREER GOALS
NextGen and Apprenticely have given me the ability to dream about what my career could look like, and I’m really excited about that. I’ve been having a good time thinking, the sky’s the limit. I can go anywhere I want. For now, I’m excited to spend the next couple of years really sinking into the sales engineering role, getting used to that. Then I’d love to go get my MBA. I think that would really create a unique blend of technical and business talent.