Last May, Chae Awong-Cole stood on a stage at North Carolina A&T State University. As a doctoral hood was placed atop his shoulders, Awong-Cole looked out at the audience.
“That’s when it honestly hit me, just looking into the crowd. And I realized: I’m a doctor now. I completed this,” Awong-Cole said of earning his Ph.D.
It’s little wonder that the accomplishment had just hit him; Awong-Cole’s schedule during the previous few years left little time for reflection. He’s a senior agilist at Duke Energy, in a role that puts him at the intersection of two of the fastest-changing industries: energy and information technology (IT).
He works with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery engineering, a team that enables IT to automate their application development and deployment processes, as well as the automation engineering and software quality engineering teams to ensure that projects run smoothly. If there’s a roadblock, he finds a way to remove it. If there’s a new opportunity for people to collaborate to speed up a project, he brings them together.
Awong-Cole has a unique skillset, combining a deep understanding of technical processes with a talent for workforce collaboration.
“Chae is good with people,” his manager Airton Ferreira said. “He always keeps the team front of mind while making sure the work gets done, asking, ‘How can I help? What can I do to help you move this forward?’ At the same time, he has a lot of technical knowledge and can talk with teams in their language.”
Awong-Cole’s skills are now bolstered by his new Ph.D. in leadership studies, which he pursued with help from Duke Energy’s Continuing Education program. This program reimburses eligible employees up to $5,250 annually for covered educational expenses such as tuition, registration and books upon satisfactory course completion for job-related undergraduate and graduate studies at approved institutions.
Just as Awong-Cole’s role at Duke Energy is interdisciplinary, so was his doctoral degree, which blended disciplines such as psychology, history and organizational science. The degree equips him to apply leadership principles to create innovative solutions to a variety of challenges.
It isn’t just within the office, however, that Awong-Cole aspires to use his doctorate to make a difference.
Bringing his lessons back home
Awong-Cole grew up in Troy, N.C., a small town of about 3,000 people. As a kid, he wasn’t aware of the professional and educational opportunities that awaited him.
He discovered the many paths he could take in 2017, when he landed a job at Duke Energy. First, he used the company’s continuing education benefit to complete a master’s degree in IT to advance his career. Soon after, he worked toward his Ph.D. in leadership studies. Now, he wants to ensure that the kids back home know more than he did at their age about the opportunities that await them.
“No one that I can recall ever came back to say, ‘Hey, you can do something. You can be somebody,’” Awong-Cole said. “And especially for a person of color like me, we always heard of the athletes, but to see someone working in IT to say, ‘Hey, I don't have any student loans because Duke Energy covered my master’s and my Ph.D., and that allowed me to be student loan debt-free relatively soon.’”
Schools from across the Troy area – from elementary to high school to community colleges – invite Awong-Cole to return to his hometown to talk to students about his professional path. He tells them about career opportunities they may not know of yet. He tells them about the benefits that come with those jobs, such as continuing education. His goal isn’t to inspire younger people to follow his exact path but to have the knowledge and confidence to discover their own.
When Awong-Cole returns to Troy to talk with young students, he engages them in practical, real-life conversations: about salaries, cost of living and the wide range of job options. Realizing college isn’t for everyone, he explains that technical schools, trade professions and even the military also offer lucrative and fulfilling options.
“The messages I convey are about the importance of education and the importance of thinking about what they want to pursue,” Awong-Cole said. “It’s about thinking about their career, where they want to go, and the impact they want to have.”
‘Keep growing, keep learning’
It’s not just younger students who’ve been inspired by Awong-Cole. As he neared the completion of his Ph.D. program, a colleague approached Awong-Cole to tell him that he, too, once dreamed of getting a Ph.D. Life had gotten in the way of his plans, but watching Awong-Cole work toward his degree had inspired him to revisit and revive that goal.
“Whether direct or indirect, Chae transmits a feeling to the team to keep growing, keep learning,” Ferreira said. “When people see that the person they work with is always educating themselves and learning the next thing, they start to realize that ‘I can do this, too.’”
Whether collaborating with his colleagues on an automation project or talking with high schoolers about their goals, Awong-Cole shares the same investment in others’ success, always asking, “How can I help? What can I do to help you move this forward?”
When he thinks of his future as a leader at Duke Energy, he realizes that his goals include more than his own opportunities and goals.
“As we grow as a company, as people, as a society, I think the great litmus test for a leader is how many other leaders they develop,” Awong-Cole said. “Our legacy isn’t just about what we accomplish, but about who else will gain from our leadership, about who else will be put in positions to lead well because of our leadership.”
