Amoura Whitney

I attribute all my success to my family, my friends, and people that have passed away in my life. I can never be successful until everyone that I love around me is successful as well in whatever they're doing. I just feel like there's no point in being successful if you see other people struggling in your circle. That's what I attribute my success to.

The best career advice I ever received was from my mentor Sammy Johnson, who was one of my professors while I was getting my BS in information systems undergrad and currently works as a senior cybersecurity specialist at Amazon. He was one of the first people to tell me to negotiate and teach me the art of that, and also to leverage and always use my skill set and any type of opportunity that I've had for the next thing moving forward, to just leverage that opportunity and put myself in a position to leverage myself. I think that's the best career advice he ever gave me.

Be 100% yourself. Don't let anybody dim your light. For context, I am a Black woman, but there's always going to be challenges because of who you are, and you can't necessarily change that. But that's why it's so important to be yourself and advocate for yourself. That's another huge one. And yeah, never let anyone dim your light.

I think the biggest challenge in technology right now is layoffs. The job market is already not the best in the United States, but in the technology field, it's a little bit harder. So that's the biggest challenge right now. But it's funny because the challenge is layoffs, but there still is a lot of opportunity to get into technology. There's so many different opportunities and a plethora of opportunities in different sub-sectors of technology as well. It's a vast market, and AI and other technologies are forming and compounding. I think now is the best time to get into the technology space because of how innovative it is.

Trust is a huge indicator of just having that trust and understanding of one another and just being honest. That trust factor is very important because you can't really do anything with anyone if you don't have that trust there. I also don't like to be around people that dim their potential. I love people that are ambitious, just like me, and people that strive to be a better version of themselves every day. I'm an ambitious, persistent, consistent individual, and I feel like in both workplace and in my personal life, I constantly find myself around people like that. And then someone that is kind and peaceful. I really love those type of values because it's a beautiful thing when you show that you care about someone and you put your best foot forward and make someone's day.