Nancy Turlington
From minimum wage to Director of IT
"I would encourage anyone to go to CCCC ... It’s a great school."
In the early 1980s, Nancy Turlington recognized that computers would be critical technology as the world moved forward. She realized this even as the young mother of three boys and working the overnight shift at an area rest home to help make ends meet.
“My husband had a good job working for the phone company, but of course we needed to make more money,” she said. “That’s why I was working at the rest home. That was for minimum wage and I needed to do better. When I looked in the paper for jobs, it seemed like everything had to do with computers.”
Nancy said she decided to call Central Carolina Community College and see if the school offered any computer courses. It did and she signed up and started classes the next Monday.
That was in 1983. Nancy still recalls the first day of classes, when the instructor told the new students about the myriad difficulties and demands of the course. Two years later, she graduated and landed a job at the Lillington branch of Esterline Defense Technologies, a California-based manufacturer of aerospace and defense technologies.
The company had just a single computer in 1985.Today, Nancy is the company’s Information Technology director and she oversees more than 75.
Nancy says she wouldn’t have been able to reach the point she’s at in life without having attended CCCC and obtaining an associate’s degree in computer programming.
“I would encourage anyone to go to CCCC,” she said. “It’s a great school.”
