This story is part of CNBC Make It’s Ditching the Degree series, where women who have built six-figure careers without a bachelor’s degree reveal the secrets of their success. Got a story to tell? Let us know! Email us at [email protected].
Ayana Dunlap had her dream job picked out before she even graduated high school.
She would spend her adult life somewhere exotic behind the front desk of a hotel in a designer suit helping guests, just like the polished women she met on vacation with her mom.
For a while, Dunlap lived out her childhood fantasy. She landed her first front desk job when she was 18 at a small hotel near Cheltenham, Pennsylvania, right before graduating high school, and continued to work at hotels well into her 20s.
“I thought I found my forever career,” she tells CNBC Make It.
In college, she chose to pursue an associate’s degree in business administration, thinking the concentration — and the shorter timeline to graduation, compared to a bachelor’s degree — would bring her one step closer to becoming a hotel manager. Dunlap graduated from Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania in 2016.
Now, the 29-year-old laughs at the plans she made almost 10 years ago.
Dunlap was one of the millions of hotel and restaurant employees who lost their jobs in 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, and were pushed into new careers as furloughs and lockdowns dragged on.
Even though she doesn’t have the job she wanted as a kid, Dunlap found a different vocation she loves: technology.
Dunlap has been working in tech since 2020. Currently, she’s the assistant vice president of operations and information technology at the Bank Policy Institute, a public policy, research and advocacy group that represents U.S. banks in Washington, D.C.
She’s earning about $125,000 in her role, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It — a salary that Dunlap says would have been “unimaginable” at this point in her career, had she…
Read the full article here
