At the recommendation of her teacher, she enrolled part-time at Georgia Southern University in Savannah as a high school senior.
“He knew I was bored in high school, and I don’t think college was that exciting either,” Maruyama, now 29, told CNBC Make It. “I remember thinking, ‘Am I going to go into debt for this?'” She left Georgia Southern after a few semesters.
For a while, Maruyama thought that without a college degree, his career options would be limited to low-paying jobs or becoming an entrepreneur.
Throughout her 20s, she worked as a lifeguard, bartender, and even a deckhand on a dolphin-watching boat, but never earned more than $30,000 a year.
Now approaching the age of 30, Maruyama has earned more than $100,000 working in AI without a bachelor’s degree, teaching young people aged 16 to 20 how to design their own careers without a degree. I am instructing.
In 2018, Maruyama and her husband Ryan moved from Savannah to Honolulu, Hawaii, to pursue their childhood dreams of becoming a cosmetic tattoo artist and firefighter.
“I saw a documentary in school about a Saudi woman who did cosmetic tattoos for women who had suffered acid burns, and I always thought that was the most amazing thing,” she recalls.
Cosmetic tattoo artists must complete classes and obtain a license and can tattoo permanent makeup, camouflage bald areas, or tattoo the entire scalp to create the appearance of hair. Masu. Maruyama obtained her cosmetic tattoo artist license in 2018 while living in Savannah.
The couple opened their own cosmetic tattoo studio, Yama Studio, in Honolulu at the end of 2018, and have been taking turns running the shop outside of their day jobs.
Ryan worked for the Honolulu Fire Department, and Maruyama worked full time at a call center for a tourism company.
Most mornings, she wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go to her call center job, where she works from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m., then returns home and works at Yama Studio from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m.
“I loved it, but it was difficult,” Maruyama recalls. “If I had time before work, I would curl up under the desk at the call center and take a quick nap because I was so tired.”
Then the coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic occurred. The Maruyama family had to close Yama Studio, and Hannah was laid off from her call center job, but she had no clear schedule as to when her job would return.
“At that point, I decided it was time to look for a new job,” she says. “I had to pay two rents: a house and a studio. Hawaii is not cheap.”
Most of the open jobs Maruyama found online were technical and required skills she had never heard of.
“Comp TIA, AWS, CISSP, all these acronyms were foreign to me,” she recalls. “However, I spent many hours on various internet forums like Reddit and Quora researching technical certifications that are currently popular and can help you find a job.”
She succeeded in becoming a Salesforce Certified Administrator, which takes about four weeks to complete and pays at least $70,000, more than double what Maruyama was making in the call center, according to information read on Reddit. I promised you that.
The Salesforce course costs about $300 and took Maruyama all of April 2020 to complete. Three months later, she landed her first technical job as a remote Salesforce developer at a business management consulting firm in Honolulu. The salary for this role was $70,000.
Most of the jobs Maruyama applied for did not require a bachelor’s degree, instead emphasizing the technical and soft skills needed to fulfill the responsibilities of the job.
“Even though I didn’t meet the education requirements, I applied. I said on my application and during the interview that I would learn what I needed to know as soon as possible,” she says. “I think the exact phrase I used was ‘I’m a shiny new penny!'”
At the same time, Maruyama began sharing his experiences finding and finding work without a college degree on TikTok under the username @degreefree.
Each video has been viewed more than 500,000 times and has been flooded with comments from teens and 20-somethings asking Maruyama for advice on how to carve out a career path without attending college.
“People liked the content and it quickly became popular,” she says. She said, “I remember staring at my phone and seeing the likes and comments pouring in and thinking, ‘There’s something here.'”
In October 2021, the Maruyama family completely closed Yama Studio and opened it in November. degree is freeis an online platform that provides career coaching and free educational resources to young people interested in careers that don’t require a college degree.
That same month, Maruyama left his job at a business consulting firm to join Neo License, a start-up that develops AI software, as an operations manager, a job that paid him a salary of $100,000.
“I knew that my previous company had its limitations, so I thought working at a startup would give me more hands-on experience and a bigger impact,” Maruyama says, adding that consistent upskilling is key. He added that this is the company’s “biggest advantage.” She is helping her advance her technical career.
She is currently pursuing certifications in data analysis and project management.
The Maruyama family left Honolulu for Houston in 2022. The reason for this was to reduce taxes and living costs. Hannah continues to work remotely full-time on her neo-license, while Ryan leaves his career as a firefighter to run Degree Free.
By all accounts, the move worked, according to financial documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. In 2023, Degree Free generated approximately $128,000 in profits from coaching services and brand partnerships, which the Maruyama family split in half.
Maruyama says the situation is very different from where he thought his career would ultimately end 10 years ago.
“Growing up, I was told that college was the end point of everything and that you couldn’t be successful without it,” she says. “But that’s not the world we live in anymore. There are a million different paths you can explore without a degree, and I consider myself lucky to have found one that makes me really, really happy.” .”
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