It was a gentleman without a pedigree that recognized some potential in me. With the help of the Employment Security Commission in Elizabeth City, near the Outer Banks of North Carolina I secured my third interview with Skills, Incorporated, a sheltered workshop that trained people with disabilities in workplace skills. In that interview, the Executive Director put down my resume, leaned back in his chair, looked at me and said "Miss Tripp, you should know that a college degree doesn't impress me." I pondered this a moment, considered the clue I had acquired during my struggle with unemployment and responded, "Well, it hasn't impressed me much either." He laughed and offered me a job. There my training career began.

My job was to teach students in the workshop one at a time how to look for and secure employment and then go out and find an employer who would give them a chance. The majority of my students was mildly to moderately mentally retarded and required the help of a job coach once at work - someone who worked with them one-on-one to learn the skills of the job. Now, there's no mistaking that my Myer's Briggs Type Indicator clearly indicates that I'm an Introvert. Knocking on the doors of employers asking for jobs was NOT in my grand plan. But knock I did, and I'm grateful for every relationship I formed with local employers during those years. The lessons learned in that job were invaluable to my own development as an employee.

Three years later my new husband began school at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. No longer a stranger to effective job search, I secured employment in short time with Goodwill Incorporated as a trainer in their computer training center. My job: to develop and deliver a job-seeking skills course for people with disabilities and disadvantages. We purchased a curriculum and I began my first experience as a classroom trainer. I was, quite simply, terrible at it. There's nothing I hate worse than being bad at what I do, so I decided to take some adult learner classes at NCSU. My first course, an Instructional Strategies course, inspired an epiphany and I began development of a new curriculum using the information learned in the class. I think the resulting program is some of my finest work to date. My skills as a trainer continued to develop. Finally a student approached me after class one day and told me mine was the class she looked forward to most each day. What a feeling.

Shortly after my skills as a classroom trainer began to come together, I received a promotion to head the new Distance Learning program at Goodwill. Once again, I found myself on unfamiliar ground. I had absolutely no knowledge of DL and spent the first month scouring listservs and the web for information about it. I was fortunate to attend the annual Distance Learning conference in Madison, Wisconsin and WebNet '99 in Hawaii. I learned much about DL and my interest in the field grew. With the help of a talented staff of curriculum writers, we drafted the initial curriculum and designed the intricate web site that was to be the Distance Learning program.