These newer arrivals join longtime practitioners like Marty Bognanno ’90, information technology manager for Navitar, a family of three optics companies; Karen Weimer ’16, an IT engineer and system administrator at Frontier; and Kimberly Alessi ’18, an IT security engineer, also at Frontier. All three have been intentional about keeping their skills sharp and their minds open to new opportunities. “As you go along, you realize the field is so vast that you can’t possibly know everything. You will forge relationships with many people who have specializations in different areas,” Kimberly said. ”You can draw information from them, and they can draw from you as well.” “It’s really helpful to go outside of your lane and learn other technologies and other ways of doing things,” Marty agreed. The ground floor Marty earned a degree in information systems at a time when few people had computers in their homes. “We couldn’t take our work home, so we spent all our time in the lab. We were all stuck in the same room together trying to figure stuff out, so it was a lot of collaboration. It was great,” he said. He studied COBOL (common business oriented language), first developed by the U.S. Department of Defense for data processing in the 1960s, with Sandy Brown and Fortran, another early programming language, with the late Patricia Nettnin. After graduating, Marty started working at Geneva General Hospital as nursing data coordinator and made sure he had a hand in installing the first computer networks there. “I made it known to everybody that I wanted in, no matter what happened, I wanted to be part of that,” he said. The knowledge gained there led to his next job at Clifton Springs Hospital and Clinic, though soon he wanted another challenge. “The best way to learn and get everything I wanted out of my career was to go into consulting and get my hands on everything,” he added After a decade consulting, he went to work for the Constellation Brands beverage company, first as a network architect then director of information security. Now at Navitar, he is the entire IT department, and he likes it that way. “I do like being my own boss or relying on myself. I’m one of those people who, if I don’t know it, I have to know it. I have to figure it out,” he said. Karen earned associate degrees in information systems and business administration from Monroe Community College in the 1980s and has worked largely in systems administration for health care, telecommunications and manufacturing. When her son was a senior in high school, Karen reviewed college offerings with him. “I came across the networking and security program at FLCC, and I thought, ‘That sounds really interesting,’ and those weren’t areas I had ever covered in my training before. So as he was starting college, I went back, too.” As a working mom, she attended part-time and took mostly evening classes over five years. The classes made her more confident in her current role and gave her more knowledge to draw on as she maintains computer systems and makes updates for security and performance. For Kimberly, the entry of computers into the workplace changed her life. “I was a bookkeeper and doing ledgers by hand, so when I began using a computer, I thought, ‘Wow. This is amazing.’” She taught herself enough about computers to gain a foothold in IT in the late 1990s and spent nearly 15 years in the field at Xerox until her job was outsourced in 2014. She qualified for state retraining funds and used it to enroll at FLCC, prompted by years of going “toe-to-toe” with colleagues who had degrees in the field. “I worked super hard. I’ve been in this field for a long time and had no degree. I wanted to prove that I was good at what I do. The degree was an important milestone and stepping stone for me to say, ‘Guess what? I do belong here.’” theLAKER | 5 Kimberly Alessi ’18 David Weir ’16 Katherine Gonzalez ’17 Karen Weimer ’16
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