After Battling Unemployment In 2024, Being An AFROTECH™ Insider Empowered Armand Cheeks To Make His Next Career Move
Confidence goes a long way, and that spirit helped New York’s Armand Cheeks make his next career move.
Cheeks, Brooklyn-born but Queens-raised, comes from an electrical engineering background as a Penn State University alumni. He has always been drawn to science and credits his mother — a lifelong educator with more than three decades of experience, and who now runs an education consulting business — for instilling in him the value of education.
“She’s really the reason for a lot of the things that I do right now,” Cheeks told AFROTECH™ in an interview.
Cheeks is a digital marketing strategist with a consulting and marketing business, which he launched after finishing Penn State in 2016. It has reached clients across seven states (New York, Pennsylvania, Washington DC, Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia). He adds that he’s worked primarily with Black-owned businesses and minority-led nonprofits based in Queens since the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
To further develop his skills, he still returns to the workforce, an approach he says also benefits him as an entrepreneur.
“If you want to work for yourself, you very well can, but you can also leverage your employer to get experience, to fund your business, and to fund your other ventures,” Cheeks explained.
Between March 2024 and early 2025 Cheeks had been without a job. So, he strategically positioned himself in spaces that could be resourceful in his career search, which led him to a sea of conferences for Black professionals. Through word of mouth, he heard about AFROTECH™ Conference. He attended in 2024 as an AFROTECH™ Insider, a premier program that connects members with industry leaders and decision-makers while offering exclusive dinners, curated talks, and a complimentary ticket to the AFROTECH™ Conference.
“Once I heard that there was a community aspect around going to the conference, I knew that it made sense for me, not only as a professional but as someone that has their own business as well,” he explained. “If I could be part of a community of people that are doing the same things, that can be of a resource or asset to me, it made as much sense to join the community and get a ticket for the long-term than it did to just go to the event as a one-off event as I had been doing to the other conferences.”
The decision was invaluable. Speaking to the Insider program, Cheeks says he attended workshops on resumes and branding. From the conference, he was able to connect with people from the WriteSea team. The company has an AI tool called JobSearchGenius.Ai for mock interviews that helped him level up his skills and feel more prepared moving forward. He also gained access to LinkedIn Premium.
Overall, the investment was worth it.
Cheeks has since landed a role at Comcast as a customer account manager. He also credits the AFROTECH™ ecosystem for helping him to be more confident during the interview process, pointing specifically to the Insider community for giving him access to the network of professionals who helped him secure the opportunity.
“I didn’t necessarily have anyone in my network that could be a resource to me when I needed to find the next thing, the next role, the next opportunity. So just being part of the AFROTECH™ Insider community is really what helped me gain access to the types of professionals that ultimately allowed me to find the role that I’m at now,” he expressed.
If you are also looking for your next career move and want to surround yourself with like-minded professionals, sign up for the Insider Program today.
“The more we give ourselves the opportunity to find the communities that serve us, the more we can be of value to our local community,” Cheeks expressed.
