🍩 How I created a career path I'm happy with

This week we’re talking about me 🙈, and how I carved a career path that made the most sense for me.

🛤️ The face that launched a thousand jobs:

I’ve had too many jobs.

Between 2013 - 2023, I held 16 positions ranging from full time, part time, contract, and volunteer. I would never recommend this many roles (or being an overthinker, or being someone with constantly moving personal goal posts).

BUT, I would recommend following your interests and finding ways to weave that into your career.

So, here’s how I did it:

2013-2016: I studied art in college because I wanted to work for Pixar. But life (and loans) come at you fast, and I found myself needing more than optimisim and dreams to pay my bills after graduation. I interned at a women’s media company during the day and worked part time with a Bay Area sports team at night, but it didn’t feel like I was building toward a career. I was completely lost.

2016-2020: After three years of misaligned post-college jobs, I joined a large tech company in 2016 as a technical support agent. For me, the work was hard, and I quickly realized it wasn’t what I wanted to do long term.

After some soul searching and many pros and cons lists, I decided I wanted to focus on working with students. Over the next fours years I worked at seven different orgs that directly supported K-12 youth. It was a grind, and at times it felt like the cycle of long days would never end. But the students I worked with changed the course of my career and formalized my dedication to supporting under-resourced demographics.

Unfortuantely, volunteering wasn’t leading to any full-time opportunities, and I desperatley wanted to get get out of technical support. So in 2018 I went back to school for my Master's in education technology.

2020-2022: The pandemic hit a few months before graduation. Overnight, my edtech degree became immediately applicable. For the first time in my professional career, my skills were in demand. To be super clear, it took me seven years after my undergraduate graduation to feel connected to my job and have highly-requested skills. Subtext: #TrustTheProcess.

With my new degree, I transferred internally from tech support to instructional design. I was finally in the education space.

In late 2020 I joined an edtech company as a program manager. At the time, I considered this the biggest win of my career. I didn’t know what program management was, but I quickly learned on the job and saw my dreams of support students and learners slowly falling into place.

2022-: Now I’m an education + community program manager for a SaaS company. I still volunteer, teach, and am active in the community.

I don’t know if there’s ever going to be a dream job for me (back to the moving goal posts thing), but I’m happy with the work I’ve done. The path to get here was frustrating and not always fulfilling, but it’s led me to create some really incredible things. I am happy.

Stick to what’s important to you. You’ll find a way to make it work.

📸 Pics or it didn’t happen!

Snapshots of my journey so far 🤸‍♀️.

Thank you for reading!