Teodora Spasova

Love, Marriage and Networking Academies

Bulgarian IT professional, Teodora Spasova founded a Networking Academy in her home town, then found love with the networker next door.

Most people advise you to keep your professional and private lives separate, but as we all know, sometimes stuff happens. And in Teodora's case, she made a lot of stuff happen herself, through sheer hard work and dedication.

School's out

Teodora's story starts three years ago when, tired of teaching in her local state school for the previous ten years, she learned about the activities of the Cisco Networking Academy.

After a decade in the same situation, she immediately started to think big. "I had the idea of opening a networking academy in the town I worked in - Svishtov. That way, finally, I would be able to train people who really wanted to learn!"

Working weekends

But Teodora knew her dream was going to take plenty of effort on her part to become a reality and was not without some financial risk. "I arranged a bank loan to cover my tuition, and by October, I was already a student in the local academy of Information Services Plc, studying during my weekends," she explains.

"Although the atmosphere on the course was friendly, none of us really had any time for a social life, and we were really only interested in passing our CCNA, so relationships were purely professional," she adds.

Building an Academy

Having passed her CCNA without a hitch, Teodora was ready to establish a Networking Academy in Svishtov. She explains: "Finally my dream was almost true. With a close friend of mine - the chairman of the managing board of the Integra Association of Sofia, Aneta Moyanova - I managed to register a local networking academy we named "Integra"."

"A little help from my friends"

Teodora has an obvious talent for getting thing done, but as she points out, she was not alone in this fantastic enterprise: "I have to mention the great support that we had from the Cisco employees in the Sofia office: Dragostina Grancharova and Vladimir Gyurov, as well as from Delyan Genkov - instructor in the Regional Academy of the Technical University of Gabrovo."

An academy is all very well, but where were the students going to come from? Teodora had already addressed that problem with an advertising campaign, which was so successful that: "I decided the number of students who wanted to enroll would be too much work for one person to handle. During that time, an academy colleague, also from Svishtov, was looking for a suitable job, so I offered him the chance for us to work together as instructors."

He jumped at the opportunity, and they both embarked on the project, with premises courtesy of the state school where Teodora had worked until recently.

The dynamic duo

Together, they proved to be quite a team, making a great success of the Integra Svishtov Networking Academy. Not content to rest on her laurels, Teodora considered ways to grow the operation:

"We started thinking how to expand our activities in the town of Troyan, where we had a group of people in the IT sphere who wanted to broaden their knowledge about computer networks."

The expanding NetAcad "empire" meant that they could both fulfill their ambitions to teach networking full time.

A deepening relationship

Traveling to Troyan every day on the bus to teach at the new branch of the academy gave Teodora and her colleague time to get to know each other better. "And soon after that, we decided to get married."

"So here we are, a year later, living happily and rejoicing at our first child - maybe a future Cisco Expert!"

With an expanding Networking Academy, a dynamic career instructing networking, a happy marriage and now a baby Teodora has it all... and her hands full. But given her track record, we are sure that she is more than up to the challenge.

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