Dan Fetter spent 20 years climbing the ranks at Target. He managed teams, handled operations, and did what you do when you have a family to support. Then he tore his pectoral tendon off the bone working out at a friend’s home gym, returned to work, and found himself reassigned as a Starbucks team lead in the store.
“I don’t even drink coffee,” he said on a recent episode of Get Into IT Live. That was all he needed to hear.
The Moment That Changed Everything
Dan had always had an interest in computers. His dad was a programmer who got headhunted from the University of North Dakota to work for 3M. The family had a Commodore 64. But life happened, kids came along, and IT stayed on the back burner for two decades.
After the Starbucks reassignment, Dan was driving home from a rough shift when a MyComputerCareer radio commercial came on. He called it a “glaring light.” He enrolled shortly after.
He was 47.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
Dan was upfront about how hard the program is, especially if you’re starting from scratch. A+ certification, Security+, the volume of information, the pace. He earned his Security+ first, then tackled the A+.
He passed the first part. The second part? He failed it. And then he pulled into a parking lot and cried.
“I’m not an emotional person,” he said. But his coworker, who happened to be standing outside, talked him off the ledge. “Dan, just keep at it, bro. It’s a new language for you.”
He took the exam again. He passed.
That moment matters because a lot of people in IT training hit a wall like that and quietly disappear from the program. Dan didn’t. And the difference wasn’t raw talent. It was the people around him, his girlfriend, his friends, his coworkers, and, as it turned out, his daughter Amanda, who popped up in the Facebook comments during the live broadcast with a simple “We’re proud of you, Dad.”
He also credited MyComputerCareer instructor Alpash Patel for making the material approachable. “They were able to explain everything step by step,” he said. “Not only are you learning that stuff in class, but when you’re on the job, it’s all the stuff that was covered in the classroom, but now it’s practical IT experience.”
The Job Search: Honest Talk
Dan graduated in February. He didn’t land his first IT role until November. Nine months of applications, follow-ups, rejections, and more applications.
“Every denial email kind of takes a little chunk of motivation out of you,” he said. “But every bad retail shift adds more motivation to your tank.”
He applied smart, networked where he could, and kept moving. His advice: “It’s a numbers game. Just keep at it and someone will want you.”
That first role was a help desk technician position with a company that took a chance on someone with no prior IT work experience. Dan thinks his customer service background, built over two decades in retail, helped get him in the door. Soft skills matter more than people expect when you’re breaking into a computer career.
Where He Is Now
Dan has since moved into a deployment technician role, contracted through On Demand Group to the Metropolitan Airport Commission. He’s currently working through an end-user computing refresh, deploying roughly 1,000 devices from 2025 to 2026. Laptops, rugged tablets, micro computers. He works out of an imaging lab at the airport’s data center.
A few weeks into the role, a senior IT security professional on his team sent him an unprompted message praising his documentation. Dan documented a complex VPN access process for remote users down to the last detail, and when another tech needed to replicate it, the notes held up perfectly.
“I thought he was joking,” Dan said. “I wanted to print his comment and put it on my refrigerator.”
He’s also spotting things in the field that take him straight back to the classroom. A recent conversation with a server team about IP address exhaustion sent him back to a Network+ lesson he’d almost forgotten. “It’s eye-opening,” he said. “You learned that in school and it’s coming to reality.”
What He Wants You to Hear
Dan closed the conversation with a direct message to anyone sitting on the fence because they think they’ve aged out of IT training programs.
“The longer you wait, the longer you’ll have to work in a career that you might not want to work in.”
He now drives to work looking forward to the day. That’s not a small thing after 20 years in retail.
If Dan’s story sounds familiar, you might want to check out our success stories or take a look at what our IT training programs cover. The first step is just finding out if it’s a fit.