John Paul Fababaer works at TopBloc.
Current title: Help desk integration consultant at TopBloc, which provides technical support for the human resources platform Workday.
Let’s say benefit information needs to be transferred to vendors like Blue Cross/Blue Shield or Aetna. They have specific requirements for how that information needs to be consumed. It’s my responsibility not only to pull in that data and make sure it’s right, but also that it’s formatted in a way that the system understands, so they can process it.
Previous career: I went to UIC for a bachelor’s in kinesiology because I wanted to go to grad school for physical therapy. A lot of my background before that was in health care. Really no technical background.
When did you finish your DPI training? April 2024.
Why tech? In health care, you’re always there in person, and there’s a lot of manual labor. I still wanted to be of service to people, but I didn’t want to have to be too customer-facing. My current job is a little more flexible.
Why DPI? Before DPI, I just did some self-learning, but the hard thing to do with learning on your own is having the discipline to do it. I was very much on and off with the things I was learning. Html, CSS, and JavaScript was my baseline. And that took me maybe about three or four months just to kind of get the baseline down.
Whereas in DPI, we did that in, like, six weeks, and then started to develop. Having people to work with, in a community, who had the same goals, helped. I felt like, I need to build something and show something for it, instead of just being stuck in tutorial hell.
You’re not the first person to mention the importance of community. It was a three-month period, right? For training and development. You’re there 40 hours a week. You wouldn’t think it would become a community. But we’re still setting up outside events just to catch up with everybody. Even now, we’re planning something for the summer just to see where everyone’s at.
What skill from your previous career helped you the most in your current one? Definitely the customer service.
Today, I’m very lucky; I have no meetings, but tomorrow I am on a few back-to-backs. A lot of it is being able to go into a call and knowing, here’s what I need to do to understand the issue my client’s dealing with. And then: how can we be reasonable with the solution? People are on deadlines, but we have to level-set expectations.
Depending on the ticket, some solutions are more involved than others, and that makes some conversations harder than others. That’s where the customer service really kicks in.
What was the most important thing you learned along the way? Soft skills.
When I first came in, my expectations were about: how can I be a developer? What languages am I gonna learn? What environment am I gonna use? The Riverside Chats, the networking, just practicing pitches, even improv classes — at first, I didn’t understand why we needed them.
Now that I’m in my role, I’m going and looking back like, wow, Matthew Klein [director of sales and talent programs for the workforce talent accelerator and a proponent of soft skills] was right.
All those things help with confidence. Dealing with impostor syndrome is a big thing. And I need to be able to communicate with my team, my manager, my senior managers, the clients, and then also the vendors.
As a consultant, maybe 70 percent is just customer service and soft skills and then 30 percent is the actual technical, “let me solve this for you.”
DPI will often place trainees with apprentice roles at companies, but you found this job on your own? Yes. I had a few friends who suggested it.
I don’t think my role is as technical as I wanted it to be when I was in DPI as a software developer. And when I interviewed, I didn’t think it was going to work out. But once I got into the second interview, that’s when everything I learned from DPI in terms of the technical side really showed through. I genuinely became more confident as I answered more questions during the interview. And the rest of it was just getting to know the manager who was talking to me and making it a conversation.
The third interview was actually on the first floor of 200 S. Wacker [where DPI is headquartered], in the lobby area. At that point I was just talking about the projects, about my past experiences. It built my confidence, based off everything I’ve learned from the program.
The job has been a surprise, really, because I’ve used the full capacity of what I learned from the program, and I didn’t think it would work out so well.
What do you like most about your job? Flexibility, and the vast amount of learning opportunities. While I’m an integration consultant, it’s important that I have a baseline understanding of other functional areas like benefits, financials, and payroll. I don’t have to be an expert, but it helps with troubleshooting why an integration might be experiencing an issue. Gaining that understanding requires a lot of personal research and collaboration with other functional teams to make sure the integrations are working as intended.
Where do you see yourself in five years? I can’t say I would know. I do enjoy the role that I have as of now, so maybe that, or maybe in a leadership role in the same area. I do like the consulting part: offering a solution for an issue that a client brings then, and then seeing the best way forward, so that we can automate a process and they can go about their day.
Some of the people at our company are Workday Architects. They ensure that the Workday solution they offer to our clients aligns with the company’s needs and best practices. These bigger projects involve a lot of collaboration, not only with the client but also the vendors. Working together ensures that the Workday system is properly integrated with third-party softwares and that the integration is automated appropriately. It requires vast knowledge and experience of Workday that I don’t have yet.
What advice do you have for people considering a shift to a tech career? It comes back to soft skills.
Yes, you need to do the job, which is the technical side. But to be able to make that transition, you do have to be able to market yourself and speak about your experiences and what are those transferable skills.
For me to have gotten this opportunity to work at TopBloc was first because of the soft skills, having worked in health care. And then the technical side is strictly because of DPI.
So, build what you want to build, in terms of the languages that you need, but once you get into conversations with people who are looking for that talent, market yourself in a way that says: I’m a good fit for your team.
*Catching up with former DPI Workforce trainees
Author: Jeanie Chung