Build Carolina

by Joshua Deal

September 12, 2025

I figure it would not be unwise to open by providing some context for anyone who happens to stumble upon this blog post since they might not be familiar with Build Carolina.

Build Carolina is a South Carolina-based non-profit organization focused on enabling the local computing technology field through offering education, support, and community-building opportunities to those interested and involved in said field. They offer courses, workshops, training, and an apprenticeship program in which their staff provides training, preparation, and support for apprentices who are then sent to work for a participating company in need of tech talent. My participation in this apprenticeship program is what brings us to the creation of this article.

Kind of...

The job market for this sector is highly volatile. Meaning, the demand for new talent in the field ebbs and flows. A year might start with a great deal of available positions and companies seeking workers to fill technology roles, and by the end of the year, we are left with a market full of eager job seekers, with mass layoffs correcting for over-hiring. You can probably imagine how this fact of life could complicate the process of trying to provide an apprenticeship program year-round.

This job market is currently in its ebb state. For reasons outside of their control, it is currently very difficult for the team at Build Carolina to find employers to host apprentices, despite having currently obtained an amazing pool of fully capable and very talented job seekers (myself included :)).

This is, of course, a little bit disappointing and even frustrating at times. But again, the volatility of the technology job market is no fault of any single humble non-profit organization. Having collected the pool of seekers and not wanting to send us all away empty-handed, much of the material from the training portions of the apprenticeship program has now been repurposed into a free three-week-long training session.

Thus, the "Fall 2025 Technology Primer" was born. And I only missed the first day of class :p

Week one is now coming to a close, which is what's led me to the writing of this article. It's homework. Over the course of the course, participants are asked to create and maintain a blog, in which they are to write about their experiences during the program, among other things maybe. I haven't gotten that far yet.

I already have a blog. It might be dusty and full of cobwebs, but it's here, and it's my own. I'm proud-ish of it. I was a little bit hesitant at the first thought of using my own personal platform to do this series, but I've thought it over a little bit, and I think it makes sense to do so now. It's been months since I last updated this blog. Every day that passes without an update increases the risk that the last post made will become the last post ever made. These blogging assignments have created an incentive to resuscitate and keep the blog alive. Not that it ever had a strong pulse to begin with, but that's okay.

It will probably be nice to have a sizable public collection of writing to someday point to and say, "Yeah, I did something once. Here's the evidence."

I'm optimistic about the technology primer. It's been fun so far. I've met some really cool people. I've learned lots of new things. I'm looking forward to the next two weeks. I don't know if my ramblings here quite hit the nail on the head for what this particular assignment was asking of me, but there's no final grade, and this won't negatively affect my GPA, so I'm going to take advantage of the little wiggle room I have to ramble in while it lasts.