 The careers of eight Eastern Kentuckians are moving onward and upward, following the completion of the first phase of a dynamic new program courtesy of Tech Hire Eastern Kentucky's work-based learning internships. The new program is a public-private partnership between the Eastern Kentucky Concentrated Employment Program and Central Lab, a tech company based out of North Carolina. The training provides participants with work-ready knowledge of the Salesforce platform. So Salesforce is a large platform that starts with customer relationship management, and we call it CRM, but it actually allows you to go beyond that. And so there's lots of organizations in lots of different industries that are leveraging Salesforce not only for their customer relationship management, but also then extending it out to things like HR management, manufacturing, healthcare. The students in the program come from different walks of life and they each bring their own reasons for wanting into the program. For this, I was a web developer for a really short time. I actually have a chemistry degree from Virginia Tech, but hadn't had success finding jobs in that field, so I decided to take my career in a different direction. The description was pretty vague, actually, but it looked like it had to do with computers programming, developing that sort of thing, which was something that I had recently taken a rather big interest in. I'm hoping to one day have a career that's not the baseline depressing reality of life in this area and lift my family up and myself and do something that brings me satisfaction rather than just doing what I absolutely have to do to survive. Those interns who complete the entire certification process will move into full-time work from home positions with center app technologies. Reporting from Hazard, for EKB News, I'm Jackson Ladder.