Nearly 15 years into her professional life, Barbara Moser felt something was missing. While she’d had several good jobs, she was frustrated that the nature of her work often meant a lack of tangible outcomes.

That changed with BY Training.

“It was awesome,” she says. “It was exactly what I needed to lose my imposter syndrome.”

Now working as an electrician’s helper with Industrial Electric Inc., Barbara looks forward to starting her five-year inside-wireman apprenticeship with the Electrical Training Institute (ETI) in January. Acknowledging that, as a 35-year-old woman, she was not a typical BY Training participant and is not a typical apprentice, she believes that simply underscores how BY can and will help anyone.

“I keep telling folks about the program,” she says. “I want to see BY Training expand.”

Actually, it wasn’t just being a woman in her thirties that made Barbara an atypical BY Training participant. It was also her background. Growing up in Seattle, she had “always wanted to be in a hands-on profession,” but as a Tulane University student in New Orleans at the start of the recession, she opted to graduate a year early with a sociology degree and find a job instead of racking up student debt.

Even though she didn’t have a college degree in education or mathematics, Barbara’s first job after college was as a high school math teacher at a school outside of New Orleans. The following year she found herself working as an intern and then in a staff position on Capitol Hill. A year-and-a-half after that, when her husband’s job brought Barbara to Indianapolis, she took a job with the nonprofit NAMI Indiana, the state’s chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Eventually working her way up to be the organization’s executive director, she stepped aside to a part-time finance role after the birth of her second child.

Despite her career successes, Barbara still was unsatisfied. She felt like she wasn’t trained for a specific career, and she still wanted to see tangible results from her efforts.

Like many people these days, Barbara found an opportunity to pivot when the COVID pandemic hit. She left the working world completely and focused on the home front. In her case, that included two young children and a 100-year-old Broad Ripple house that needs constant work. Frustrated by contractor issues, she started doing work herself with guidance from YouTube, handy friends and mentors, and a Facebook group called “Handy Women.”

She loved it, and she also proved to be good at it. So she tackled bigger and bigger projects. And friends started calling her for help with their home projects. After a while, she thought maybe it was time to look into doing that work as a career.

“I remember, one day when my son was in preschool, like an hour before he was getting out, I realized I was tired of being at home and fixing things and not getting paid for it,” she said.

She went online and looked for programs that might help her get her foot in the door somewhere. That’s when she found the BY website. “It sounded like exactly what I was looking for,” she said.

And it was. Barbara enjoyed the classes and her fellow students, and she appreciated the opportunity to learn from experienced instructors in class and in the field with Neighborlink (now Home Repairs for Good). She liked that the culture of the classes was modeled after the culture of the construction industry.

She also liked that the program helped her connect with training programs around Indianapolis, which is how she got her first construction job. (Once someone applies for the ETI program and sends in their transcripts, they can be placed in the field, even before they’re accepted into the program.)

“I loved being on the jobsite and not feeling like I was a fish out of water,” she says. “It boosted my confidence.”

With a son in kindergarten and a daughter in fourth grade, Barbara is ready to go all-in on this next stage in her life, finally feeling like she is training for a specific career and working on projects with tangible results.

“It was a pretty big leap” to go from stay-at-home mom with a white-collar background to electrician’s helper with an apprenticeship lined up, but Barbara is glad she made that leap.

“I am thankful for the BY program and all the resources that really made this opportunity possible for me,” she says.

Stories like Barbara’s wouldn’t be possible without support from Lilly Endowment – Thank you!