“Homecoming” is our new series in which we tell the stories of Avanade “boomerangs,” employees who left the company for other opportunities before returning. Careers are long and winding, and personal and professional aspirations vary from person to person. It’s natural for people to want to branch out, but wherever you go and whatever you do, there is always a home for you at Avanade.

When you’re talking about boomerangs, by definition, everyone comes full circle. But for Group Manager John Reynolds, the benefits of starting at Avanade right out of college truly propelled his career and then brought him back into the fold. He was part of the first Ignition Class – Avanade’s multiweek onboarding program for Analysts – in 2005.

“It was my first real job. I was here for four years and had a great time working on a lot of interesting projects,” John said. “Looking back, I’m glad that I went into consulting because it gave me a huge amount of experience that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It was a big accelerator for me – it allowed me to go on and do a lot of things I might not have otherwise been able to do with the same number of years of experience.”

After four years with Avanade, John left the company to work with a client with whom he had built a strong relationship over the course of their work together. He had enjoyed his work at Avanade, but he said that he was at a time in his life when he was looking to reduce his travel while still spreading his wings. The new job was a corporate IT role, and the company had a lot of interesting projects that were forward-thinking – he remembers they started working with Azure as early as 2009.

He then moved on to build Amazon Web Services solutions for a smaller company in the health care space, taking on new challenges that would grow the depth and breadth of his experience.

“The pace of health care was a little slow for me,” John said. “I worked on the research side of things, which was cool stuff, but to get it incorporated to the point that people were actually using it at bedside – there was more bureaucracy than I wanted to deal with. I was there for four to five years, and then I wanted to come back to consulting.”

Now at a different point in his life, travel held more of an appeal for John, and the draw of consulting was what he had sought out in his career since leaving Avanade – he loved the variety of working on different projects. Though his career has taken him to several different industries, he recognized that consulting brought him that sort of ever-changing challenge on a regular basis. Luckily, he had stayed in contact with several people at Avanade and felt comfortable having conversations about coming back.

“We’ve made a big push into Azure, I wanted to stay with that on a bunch of different projects,” he said. “John Lee – who hired me back – and I had talked about that as a goal. Azure is a big focus for Avanade, so the company really aligned with things I wanted to do. It’s been good to come back.”