Rodney Bey II is following in his mother, Cynthia Bey’s, footsteps after graduating from Goodwill’s BankWork$ training program. Cynthia, who participated and graduated from Cohort 3, encouraged her son to apply.
“She was telling me about the program and thought it was something that I would be really good at, because she knows that I have a background in finance, and I am really good with numbers,” Rodney said. “She made it sound really appealing to me because I was in an area where I was looking to change my industry.”
Rodney has always had an interest in the finance industry. In high school he was a part of the Academy of Finance, and even went to college for accounting, but never completed his degree.
For about nine years, Rodney gained a foothold in the accounting industry and worked in billing departments managing accounts receivable, accounts payable, business-to-business collections and more. But today he’s working in the banking industry.
“I am a Personal Banker 1. I’m working at Fifth Third Bank,” Rodney exclaimed. “I really like it here. It’s a really good training program they have set in place, and a lot of good, nice, helpful people.”
Reaching his goal did not come without a challenge. Originally, Rodney was hoping to be a part of BankWork$ Cohort 4, but unfortunately, he was not accepted. But that didn’t deter him – he was motivated to gain stability in his career.
“Even though I have been doing accounting for about nine years, I didn’t really have a career because I was doing a lot of temp work, getting jobs through temp agencies,” Rodney said.
In Goodwill’s tuition-free BankWork$ training program, participants learn about the financial services workplace, bank regulations, bank products, cash handling, processing customer transactions, and more.
“I always sing praises about the BankWork$ program because I feel like without that, I wouldn’t have been as prepared to be here in this position, and I wouldn’t have been exposed to as many bankers,” Rodney explained about the training program, which incorporates industry professionals into the classroom curriculum. “Everything that I’ve learned in BankWork$, I’m seeing it in this training, and it really helped me to be prepared for this – have the correct mindset that you need to be in this industry.”
When taking one of Goodwill’s tuition-free training programs, participants are assigned an Employer Engagement Specialist and Career Navigator who help them with resumes, interviews, and more. Thanks to the help of Rodney’s Career Navigator, he was able to successfully hone his interviewing skills, which ultimately helped him land his current role.
“They have a particular line of questioning that they ask, and you have to give a lot more examples of things that you’ve done when you do banking,” Rodney explained of the interview process.
Training programs like the one Rodney took are available free of charge to the community, thanks to shopping and donating at Goodwill’s 36 retail locations and more than 40 donation sites, in addition to corporate, community, and philanthropic donations.
Rodney encourages people to enroll in Goodwill training programs. He said, “If this is something that you really want to do, if you’re really at a point in your life where you really want to make a change and you’re ready to do the work, then Goodwill is definitely a good place to make that happen. They have a lot of different programs to set you up to be an industry professional.”
If you would like to help fund Goodwill’s programs and services that we offer to the community free of charge – like the ones that helped Rodney on his pathway to prosperity – consider dropping off your gently used donations at one of our retail locations or making a financial contribution.
