April Thompson is an informative and inspirational speaker, coach, trainer, and STEM advocate passionate about sharing personal stories and tools to help individuals and teams embrace non-conformity and lean into their unique strengths and values to do life, career, and business differently. She has had the privilege of delivering workshops, trainings, and talks to global audiences of up to 7,000 technologists, human resource professionals, marketers, students, career transitioners, and travel enthusiasts both virtually and in person. Her talk topics have ranged from lessons learned on her multi-year career break to building scalable architectures in the cloud.

In her over 16-year career, April has led teams and impactful projects across multiple functions in the tech industry including marketing, sales, consulting, program management, and training making pivots based on her values and what sparked her curiosity. In many cases, she navigated these experiences as the F.O.D. (first, only, or different) and heavily relied on the fact that knowing who you are gives you permission to do, be, and try new things without seeking validation.

Today April manages a portfolio career that includes training and enablement leadership at Amazon Web Services, independent career consulting services for career transitioners, and speaking. She earned a BS in Computer Engineering with a minor in Mathematics from Mercer University and MS in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. In 2018 she completed her Life Coaching Certification from the Life Purpose Institute and recently completed training in Human Design.

Her top 5 CliftonStrengths are relator, futuristic, ideation, maximizer, and intellection. She is a 3 / 5 sacral generator (Human Design) and INTP (Myers Briggs), and her core values are freedom, novelty, growth, and fun.

Life and Career Design
Life's too short to spend the majority of your days miserable. I enjoy helping individuals find joy in their work and lives today while creating a path to work toward their ideal work and life scenario, starting with mindset.

STEM Advocacy
As a Black woman and engineer by training who has spent over a decade across multiple functions in tech, I'm a huge proponent of providing access and exposure to STEM education and careers, especially to women/girls and other underrepresented communities.

Leadership, Development, and the Future of Work
As a long-time, career mentor/coach and people manager, I am passionate about human behavior and interactions between people in the workplace and the impact and effectiveness of leadership and development programs and enablement. Though not a trained organizational psychologist, the future of work, remote work, great resignation, burnout, work-life balance, wellness, stress management, and related topics inform the way I lead, show up, and work.

Human Design
Leveraging human design as a tool for individuals and teams to step into their work and lives as their truest selves and to their highest potential. Similar to Enneagram or Myers Briggs personality assessments, human design is a system that reveals your energetic blueprint and how you are uniquely wired to thrive. It is not about changing who you are; it’s about giving you full permission to be who you’ve always been.

Travel and Cultural Exchange
Through the years, I've traveled to over 25+ countries for a mix of work and leisure. I've lived in the Philippines and Ghana, studied abroad in South Africa, and even hosted group tours in Jamaica. Traveling, in many cases as a solo woman has and continues to provide life lessons on appreciating differences, patience, spontaneity, and gratitude to name a few.