These were Annie Cochran's jobs to pay her bills a year ago: Freelance graphic designer. Contractor. Model and whiskey sales representative.

She ditched those gigs to pursue a career in tech. Now Cochran, who lives in Cincinnati, leads a team of software engineersto ensure online deliveries go smoothly for the Kroger grocery chain.

Around the same time, Wes Woods struggled to make ends meet. He was a bartender, a DJ, and a delivery driver in Cleveland. He, too, made a similar career pivot to tech and now works as a software developer at J.P. Morgan Chase in Columbus, Ohio.

Both were recipients of Represent Tech, a scholarship to get more women, people of color, and those in the LGBTQ community working in tech. It's part of Tech Elevator, an intense 14-week software developer training program also known as a coding boot camp.

"I took a bet on myself. I didn't have any coding background besides putting sparkles on my MySpace page back in the day," Woods, 34, said, about Tech Elevator. "It's rigorous work in a short span, but if you want something bad enough to change your life, you'll find a way to do it."

Woods is among the more than 3,100 students nationwide who graduated from Tech Elevator, now considered one of the top-ranked coding boot camps in the U.S. by the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting (CIRR), a nonprofit that reviews boot camps and report their data, and the Course Report, an online research platform .

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For Cochran and Woods, their unique entries into the competitive tech workspace also come at a juncture when women and underrepresented groups in tech still remain dismal.