While I've been in the Navy the learning has never stopped. I'm always learning something new. By the time you graduate ETA school, Electronics Technician Class A School, you will have gone through so much training, that there will be a discipline behind you that will help you throughout your career and the rest of your life. Electronics technicians are highly successful in both the civilian world and the military world.

What helped me learn to study and succeed as an electronics technician was essentially the desire to succeed. One of the drives for me to succeed as an electronics technician was knowing that I would have a great career path after I got out of the Navy. Technicians in the civilian world get paid quite a bit of money.

When you're going through electronics schools, the instructors are always available to help you if you have problems. There's always an extra study available in the evening.

Communication skills are extremely important in the Navy. Not only in my present position as an instructor, but also in a leadership position. If you can't communicate well to the people under you, then the job's not going to get done.

My leadership and teaching skills were mostly learned through on-the-job training and experience. However, the Navy also has schools for leadership and teaching.

In the 18 years I've been in the Navy, the training has never stopped. I've been to so many schools I couldn't even think of all of them right now.

I've been to a school that has college credits to learn how to teach. It's called Instructor Training, IT School. As you advance in pay grades, there's training that's given for each pay grade. When you get stationed at a new command, inevitably it'll have different types of equipment and you'll be sent to schools to learn how to maintain those individual pieces of equipment and you're awarded what's called NECs, which are four-digit number and they classify you as a person on what you need - what you know how to teach.

The Navy is based on everybody teaching everybody else.

Something since I've been in the Navy that I've gained from is all the education that the Navy has given me. It's going to allow me to succeed in the civilian world, in the civilian job market and job placement. What that will also give me is better pay.

The characteristics that have helped me since I've been in the Navy have been discipline when it comes to studying, when it comes to performing my job in a professional manner, leadership, a drive to succeed.