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Jason Lukach enjoys learning on the job.
Lukach, 45, of southern New Jersey, is a senior field solutions architect at CDW, an information technology company specializing in enterprise networking.
Lukacs provides technical expertise during the company’s sales process, visiting customer sites and discussing which products and services would upgrade their company’s technology systems.
But Lukacs wasn’t always an IT guy. He moved into the industry from communications and journalism after deciding he wanted a more analytical job. In the early 2000s, he said, there weren’t many options for non-traditional technology avenues. He continued to learn while working in various roles over the years.
In this episode of Technical.ly’s How I Got Here series, Lukach talks about his career pivots and offers advice to young IT professionals. This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
Did you go to school in a tech-related field?
I don’t. I went to Shippensburg University. I have a degree in Communications/Journalism. I originally wanted to be a journalist. I wanted to do music journalism, film journalism, or something like that.
What I ended up doing was going out and doing some copywriting jobs, copyediting jobs, internships and stuff like that. I work in a PR agency. I worked for a while in New York City as a copywriter at a marketing firm. Later I found my way into IT.
How did you become interested in IT?
It started more as a hobby. I was working at a company called Toth in New York City. I’ll do my PR work. I was exhausted very quickly. I would basically come home and mess around on my computer all night. I found that more interesting than the work I was actually doing.
I said [to myself], “I don’t want to spend my time getting better at writing, copyediting, or public relations.” I think I’ve always been a better analyst, with an analytical mind. In writing, public relations, or journalism, you have to have more influence. It’s not necessarily what I’m good at or what I want to move forward with. I’m good at taking things apart. I’m good at figuring out how things work, systems, computers, technical stuff. That’s the direction I want to keep going.
So how do you achieve this?
One day I said, “You know what, I’m going to make this career change.” I didn’t have any formal training and I never really went to school or anything like that. So all I need to do is be as focused as possible. Basically I just gave up. I taught during the day, took some online and evening classes and similar courses to learn more about IT, and worked my way up to qualifying for an entry-level help desk position. This was my first real IT role.
Once I got into IT, I really just took on bigger roles and moved up where I saw those opportunities to get better and keep moving forward.
Where did you take your first class?
There once was a computer school that is long gone, called Chubb College. The IT training landscape has changed very, very significantly. When I got into IT, maybe you lived somewhere where the local community college had some certificate training courses. And then there was a specialized school, like I said, Chubb Academy. These are some of the courses I took, like evening and online courses.
This was 2003, so on the Internet, it was basically an online forum. We didn’t do video calls or anything like that. The resources now are far beyond what I was dealing with at the time, so it’s great to see how things have changed. Later, when I was already working in IT, I took some courses at Camden County College.
What excites you about your current role?
I love solving problems for clients. That’s what I really like. On a busy day, I’ll be talking to five to six clients a day, and I have to keep all of these different environments on track. Every customer has different needs. Every client has different business goals. It is my responsibility, along with the entire CDW account team, to help them achieve this goal. But it never gets stale. And you never see the same thing every day, just because you have so much variety and so many different conversations every day, there’s always something going on.
I love taking things apart and figuring out how they work, and I love solving problems. I think there’s no better environment than technology because it’s always changing. I’m always learning something new, there’s always something new, there’s always something new that I can offer these clients.
What advice do you have for someone starting out in their IT career?
I think the problem is learning everything you can quickly. Keep learning things. Don’t be lazy. Choose a job that teaches you something other than just paying the bills.
Rarely do people start out in one major, you have to understand how all the pieces fit together before you can focus on a single path. So it’s good to have broad common sense and then pay attention from there.
So start where you can learn everything, understand how all the pieces fit together, understand how all the technologies work together as one big solid environment, and then specialize.
Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 fellow with 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.
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