Confab 2021

Creating new opportunities at work

Here are the highlights (and insights) from my small group discussion about career paths and pivots

Our discussion group participants getting ready to dive in. I’m on the top left looking shiny

To give you some background, I’ve been working in the content field for almost 20 years now. I started out on the nonprofit side, working for local organizations like the Community Word Project and then the Girl Scouts of the USA.

I ended up getting recruited into agency life as a “verbal identity consultant” because I could:

• Write web content
• Create research plans and curricula
• Design workshops

A logo quilt of the employers and clients I’ve worked with along the way

Consulting gave me the opportunity to work on more than just websites. I worked on digital magazines, brochures, advertisements, videos, and interactive experiences like apps and games.

More than anything, I loved seeing how people interacted with the experiences I’d helped create.

So I moved out of consulting to an experience design role at Mastercard, where I currently run a team focused on creating and maintaining healthy product content ecosystems for our key initiatives.

Some of the “mini-pivots” and learning opportunities that led me to larger career pivots along the way

As you can see, I’ve had a couple of pivots in my career — made possible by cumulative skill-building opportunities along the way. In my career journey, I’ve learned the importance of:

• Plain language to help reach a wider audience
• Networking and collaboration to open new doors
• Leveraging research and insights to make better decisions
• Designing dynamic content for interactive experiences
• Optimizing content for localization
• Sharing knowledge with your professional community

I shared with the group some of my key takeaways from almost two decades (gulp) of working in the content discipline.

Some key takeaways I shared with the group re: creating opportunity

Some key takeaways:

• Be someone people want to work with. When people know they can rely on you, they’ll offer you new ways to shine.
• Ask the right questions. Learning leads to opportunity, so don’t bee afraid to admit when there’s something you don’t know or understand.
• Tell your own story well and often. Sharing with your community is a great path to opportunity.
• Take some calculated risks. Look for ways to maximize your skills ands pick up new ones.

I asked the group to spend a few moments thinking about the following questions:

• Which parts of your current role energize you?
• What are you passionate about?
• What are you curious about?
• How can you tell your own story better, or more often?
• How can you leverage or grow your network to help you?

After considering these questions individually, I asked the groups to spend 30 minutes sharing their own career experiences with each other. Storytelling can be a powerful way to inspire others to try new ways of doing things, and sharing our own personal career paths led to some powerful insights.

Here are some of the prompts I provided to guide the discussion. I asked the group to share a time when:

• An opportunity came your way because of a colleague’s recommendation
• Asking the right questions opened up new possibilities for you
• Telling your story well gave you an advantage
• You took a risk, and it paid off professionally

Some discussion prompts to get the groups to share their own stories

At the end of the half-hour, the three breakout groups came back for a 20-minute debrief.

It wasn’t enough time to cover all the “bombs of knowledge” the groups came back with, but the power of that time spent together sharing and empathizing with each others’ experiences was palpable.

We found that many of us had been ESL teachers and technical writers in our former lives. Many of us had worked in journalism and social media. And quite a few of us had come to the same conclusions about how to create new opportunities at work — not “find”, but “create” — which I’ve grouped into four themes below.

Work your angles

• Get in on new projects, where you have more of a chance to impact the work
• Bring a “beginner’s mind” to every partnership. Start fresh and find the opportunity to show your value
• Help folks understand how and when to pull you in. Develop and communicate clear engagement models to make requests less reactionary and more strategic
• Consider working for a smaller organization, where you may have more chances to broaden your mandate and your skill set

Work your hustle

• Find a “side hustle” to build your portfolio and skills
• Freelance work is another way to build a portfolio and knowledge base
• No time for a side hustle or freelance gig? Make one up. Turn a content lens on a broken design to demonstrate what you can do

Work your contacts

• Set up informational interviews with people who might take a chance on you — people who are actively building teams
• No idea who’s looking to build a team? Look around, and ask around
• Good relationships can give you access and information to open doors internally and externally

Work your skillset

• Sign up for a UX writing training program
• Identify the “meta content strategy” for your career. What has your cumulative experience taught you, and how is that valuable?
• Find the silver lining. Some people mentioned that “social media is a black hole”, but it can be a chance to learn other skills and develop new allies

Thanks again to everyone who joined the group. It was truly an energizing conversation, and I hope I’ve been able to bring some of that energy to those who were unable to attend.

Thanks also to Alexis Logsdon for facilitating, and Kristina Halvorson for extending the invite.

The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article we publish. This story contributed to World-Class Designer School: a college-level, tuition-free design school focused on preparing young and talented African designers for the local and international digital product market. Build the design community you believe in.