From Teaching Kids to Tech Consulting: Jessica Parker’s Career Resilience Secrets | Ep038

Manuel: Welcome everyone, my name is Manuel Martinez and this is another episode of Career Downloads. For each episode, I basically hit the refresh button, bring on a different guest to really learn more about their career and their experiences with the goal to help uncover any actionable advice that you can use as you’re managing your own career. So for today’s episode, I have with me Jessica Parker. We met at a local SIM networking event. I asked her a little bit about kind of the things that she has done over time. There was a lot of interesting information in there. We’ve had a couple of follow-up conversations and I’m really excited because apart from, you know, just the different ways that she’s navigated her career, she’s also built a career workshop. She’s a Toastmaster, so there’s a lot of great details within her career that I’m excited to kind of dig into and we probably won’t get to everything, but, you know, that’s probably a good thing because maybe I can convince her to come back and we can do a part two at some point. So with that, I’ll go ahead and introduce Jessica.

Jessica: Thank you so much, Manuel. I really appreciate it. It was so much fun getting to talk to you at the SIM event. The Society for Information Management, our local Las Vegas chapter has grown so much and it’s been exciting because everybody I get to talk to there, I learned so much from them. It’s a lot of fun.

Manuel: I agree and I hadn’t, this is probably only the second or third event that I had been to, but it was probably the first one where I’ve got to speak to more people and kind of learn a lot more. So, you know, I’m very excited and just like you, right? Just like you mentioned, you have the ability to learn and meet new people. So for this conversation, if you wouldn’t mind just kind of telling us where you’re currently at and what it is that you do in your current role.

Jessica: Well, I often describe my role as a consultant and that’s because I am a consultant. I do a lot with understanding data, understanding what’s going on behind the scenes. I do a lot with cybersecurity and AI in my doctoral research because I’m oh so close to finishing up my doctorate. I’m doing the research this semester and hope to defend in the fall. I’m planning to defend in the fall. I got to be positive about this, you see. Determine, I will defend this fall sometime between September and December, and then I will have finally earned my doctorate, which is pretty exciting. And that doctoral thesis is focused on the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, which is where I get to dig into all of that. I do consulting work where I’m helping small businesses figure out their technology solutions. I’m working with one entrepreneur right now, looking to migrate their site from a solution that was built in 2001. Their developer’s in China and the developer’s ready to move on. It’s time to find somebody new. They don’t have a lot of technology folks in their networks. Reached out to me because my sister’s also involved in the project, so it’s kind of fun.

Manuel: That’s amazing. And it’s interesting, you know, just being able to help out in different areas and how you kind of connect with people, right? Like you mentioned, that was your sister that’s involved with it. She brings you in, and I think that’s a theme that I’ve seen through a lot of these different conversations. So now, if you can tell us a little bit about where you grew up, again, we don’t have to go into a lot of detail, but just kind of summarize it for us, and then eventually what your path looked like as, you know, we don’t have to go straight into where you got into technology, but kind of what sparked that interest, or, you know, some people it’s early in their career or in life, and some people it’s not until later on, and they just accidentally fell into it. So I’m very curious to learn more.

Jessica: It was definitely not straight. (both laughing) Anything but straight, circuitous, probably. When I grew up, my mother and I moved quite a bit. We moved less frequently once she remarried, but I did the math. By the time I was 18 years old, I moved an average of once a year. I moved 18 times by the time I was 18 years old. That flexibility that comes with that moving frequently is an asset, the one drawback, well, there’s several other drawbacks, but one of the key drawbacks is you don’t have like that same group of friends that you build deep relationships with during your childhood. So people I knew in kindergarten, aside from family, I don’t know them now, because I never saw them again after that. People I knew from first and second grade, never saw them again after that. Third grade, oh, that was fun. I got to go to two schools. I was really mad because we moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the school year ended in May, to Southern California, where the school year ended about a month later. I was, you know, and for a third grade kid, you’re just mad, what do you mean I have to go to more school? I could have been done. It’s those little things that make you mad as a small child. As an adult, you have more perspective. Over time, we did end up staying enough in the same area that I got to build a little bit more depth of friendship through high school. My high school happened to offer a computer class. This was the eighties, just for context. I’m not shy about my age. I got to take BASIC programming, as we took BASIC programming on an Apple IIe that had less memory than my cell phone does now, we could take apart the computer. So it had basically a lid on top that you could just pop off, and you could see all the circuits. So our computer instructor not only taught us how to program in BASIC, but also how the circuit boards were connected and how everything worked. I was super excited for around my 16th birthday to get my very first computer, an Apple IIe with a double disk drive. You know, the big floppies, and it had extended memory. That’s right, it had 64K.

Manuel: Wow.

Jessica: That computer actually stayed with me for at least 15 years. Over time in school, I enjoyed BASIC programming, and we had an AP Pascal course at my high school. We had a lot of advanced placement courses. I took that one. So yes, the programming languages I first learned were BASIC, mostly everybody’s first language, and Pascal, a language so archaic that many people have no idea what it is now. I thought, oh yeah, I’m gonna go be in computer programming. Seemed like a good opportunity. So I applied to all these highly competitive schools and did not get accepted to the highly competitive schools the way I thought I would. I had 3.8-9 GPA. I’d taken all these advanced placement and honors courses all throughout school, so I’d taken all the hard courses, and they didn’t give us extra points for that at the time. And I had a decent SAT score for the days. It was, I think, 1260, something like that. I thought, oh cool, I’m going into computer science. It’s not a career that women are into a whole lot. I thought I had it made. I applied to Berkeley. They said no. I applied to MIT. That was where I really, really wanted to go. They also said no. I applied to UC Santa Cruz as kind of this backup because they were known as a party school at the time. I got a free ride scholarship that I said no to. And I ended up applying and getting into Wellesley. Wellesley College in Massachusetts. It’s a sister school to MIT, and that was kind of my, well maybe I can take classes at MIT, even though it’s a liberal arts school. I didn’t stay there very long for a lot of complicated reasons, but that is where I met my first husband.

Manuel: And as part of that journey, having all of these different competitive schools basically tell you no, did that fuel you to say, I’m going to go through, like you mentioned, hey, maybe I’ll take some classes at MIT to kind of show that I can do this, or was it more of maybe, at least at that time, right? Did you feel like maybe I’m not as good as I thought I was? So I’m just curious the thought process as you’re going through this, because everybody’s different.

Jessica: Well, it’s really frustrating and disheartening when you don’t get into schools that you think you ought to be able to get into. I had, again, a good GPA, I worked really hard, I had extracurriculars, I had a job while I was in high school, I thought I was in good shape. I’d done the quiz bowl and the debate team and the academic decathlon stuff, had awards for that. You know, can’t get much more nerdy than all of those accomplishments, and yet didn’t get in. It was very disheartening, but I always have a philosophy, and I must have had it even then, where there’s a will, there’s a workaround. I’m like, okay, if I can’t get in the front door, there’s a side door.

Manuel: And that’s where that came in of going to–

Jessica: The sister school.

Manuel: The sister school and saying, okay, well, this is the side door, eventually I can work my way in.

Jessica: I can choose to go in the front door. There were some complications around my financial aid, so I had to take a pause. When I took the pause, I ended up moving to Minnesota because that’s where the person I’d met while I was at Wellesley was from. Moved to Minnesota, got married, which resolved my financial aid issues. That’s a whole other long drawn out story we don’t need here. However, got married, went to school, got my undergraduate degree. When I started going back to school there, I went one year at the community college because it’s cheaper, and frankly, they have a really good quality of education at the community college because the teachers care about you as an individual. They don’t have 500 people in a lecture hall. They’ve got 30 people. It’s a reasonable number of students to keep track of, so they get to know you as a human being, and they recognize you have a life outside of those four walls because I was working part time. Well, that’s harder. When you’re going to a school where they’re expecting you to only live on campus and be embedded in a school, they don’t think about you having a life outside those four walls in the same way. So I really appreciated the community college experience. As I was getting through the first semester, I had to think about what did I want to do because I took general classes. It doesn’t matter. My original major was computer science. I started taking some classes. I had done some work in offices, and I’m like, ew, I don’t want to work in an office. Right? You think about these things, and this is being young, different perspective. I don’t want to do that. Well, what could I do where I don’t have to work in an office? For some reason, it decided in my little brain that the right answer for me was to become an elementary school teacher. Don’t exactly remember what was going on inside my head. I was in my 20s. (laughing)

Manuel: And I’m sure as an elementary school teacher, right, it’s not an office. You’re around kids. You’re like, well, this sounds like it’s going to be fun because–

Jessica: I’m helping other people.

Manuel: Right. I have a sister that’s an elementary school teacher, and she loves it. And so I could see how that would draw you towards at least that type of career. But that’s a big shift going from computer science to elementary school teacher. So how did you continue on from there?

Jessica: So after I figured out where I was going, and that was in that first semester at the community college, I worked with their office to figure out, all right, what classes can I take here that will transfer to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, so I can get my four year there without having to do rework? Because not every course will transfer the same. And if they already have courses that you know will work, take those because otherwise you have to do it over. And that’s expensive and time consuming. And I had already taken a year off. So as far as my brain was concerned, I was already a year behind. And I don’t like being behind, right? (laughter) So I figured that out in partnership with the office, mapped those courses out, finished those generals through the course of that school year and applied to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, was accepted into the elementary education program, which at the time was an undergraduate degree program. It has since become only a post BA kind of program. So it’s not a master’s program, but you have to have your bachelor’s to enter this program. They’ve shifted it. But at the time it was my undergraduate degree program was elementary education. And then you wanna get a minor, typically. I needed one class to take and get a minor in math. I opted not to do that. I was kind of, I’d gotten to the point in mathematics, I’d taken third semester calculus at Wellesley, which was really, really cool. It was a lot of work, however, because I never had second semester calculus. I took first semester calculus in high school and got AP credit for that. During the remaining month between when you take the AP exam and when the school year ended, we went through some of the concepts that you’d see in second semester calculus. Then they gave me a placement test at Wellesley and said, oh, you can take third semester. I’m like, okay. That was the hardest I’ve worked in a math class in my entire life. Because I’d never had the second semester, I was playing catch up. That was, I found a tutor, I got help, because otherwise that’s the only class in my entire academic career, I was at risk of failing. And fortunately I got help from a good tutor on campus. There were resources there. Every school has them. I didn’t expect to need them. But I did. Yay support. I got my grade, I passed, I got a C. I almost got a, you know, almost got a C plus. But I worked really hard for that C because I’d never had second semester calculus. That left me with a really distaste for my mathematics courses that I did not wish to repeat. Plus what, as an elementary school teacher, what am I gonna do with something beyond calculus in an elementary school situation? I mean algebra, geometry, sure. Calculus, you’re not even using that. Beyond calculus? So I took a step back and I said, what’s gonna be useful? And I had taken Spanish in high school. I opted to take Spanish as my minor. So I had to take a lot more classes to fill that role, including a Spanish literature class where I actually had to analyze Spanish literature in the Spanish language and write essays in Spanish, as well as pass the university’s proficiency exam.

Manuel: At that time, you mentioned that, you know, what’s gonna be beneficial to you as an elementary school teacher? What gave you the foresight to say Spanish? Or even just a second language in general? I can now with the amount of diversity that, you know, you see in kids and, you know, different languages, there’s now established ESL or English as a Second Language courses or classes. I don’t know if at that time those courses or that type of curriculum was available. So what made you kind of think about that?

Jessica: Well, I grew up, again, in Santa Fe and in Southern California. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, my stepfather was a native of the area. And when I say native, I mean descended from the colonial Spaniards and the local Indians, the Pueblo. So truly native. And his family spoke both Spanish and English fluently. I found that that was, I was exposed to a lot of people in Santa Fe that spoke both languages, sometimes in the same sentence. In Southern California, you see a lot of Spanish. A lot of folks from Mexico, you see the language everywhere. It’s helpful to have that language to understand people and build relationships. They did have ESL programs and they also had immersion programs that were just starting up in school programs in terms of, you know, you go to an immersion elementary school where you get immersed in a second language from kindergarten on up. And through that process, then you become bilingual by the time you graduate from, I think, middle school.

Manuel: You continue on with your college career and I’m assuming at this point, you get your minor in Spanish and then also your bachelor’s in primary education.

Jessica: And then I was able to take the pre-professional skills test, which they require of all educators. It’s can you read, write and do basic math? I was never so appalled to be tested on something in my life. I understand why they have it. It’s sad that they feel the need to have it because if I couldn’t master those skills, I shouldn’t have been in college. It was one of those very strange things. I graduated into a market in 1993 where most people graduating from the program expected to work as a substitute teacher for a number of years before getting enough experience to find and land a full-time teaching job. It was very competitive. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for shiny new teachers to get those full-time jobs. Manuel; So I’m assuming at this point, this is you’re starting to see another challenge or another similar to not getting accepted, right? Like, hey, this door is potentially gonna be closed and are you having to start thinking about how am I gonna go around this in this competitive field?

Jessica: I started looking at it because I’m a planner. Before I graduated, I started looking into where the opportunities were and what different school districts had to offer in the area. I think I applied to maybe three or four school districts, including one that I had done my practicum in. I didn’t get a call back in that district. However, the suburban district that I applied to had a school that was teaching Spanish. And when I saw that, my eyes lit up. Sweet, I wonder what the competition pool is for this. And I was in luck because I landed an interview, had a panel interview, which was not something I had had before. Like, oh, this is different. I’m not used to a room full of people kind of grilling me about my experience, my philosophy of education, my style of teaching, how I worked with children, all of those things. And I was still really, really young. I was so young that after I was hired working in the school building and it was a kindergarten through, let’s see, sixth grade, I had somebody ask me if I was a student. Like, hey, no, I’m not a student. I’m older than 13, I swear. I’m one of the teachers. And I got that job because of the Spanish, because that was the language that that school had adopted. They had a special Spanish language teacher, and then I was able to reinforce the Spanish language in the classroom with the mixed grade groups. And we taught in kind of a cluster of three or four classrooms that would trade off different skills. So one teacher would specialize in art, and that would be the special skill that she brought to the cluster or he brought to the cluster. And I was the Spanish specialist who would then help reinforce the Spanish language with those kids. Yay, job, straight out of college. It can happen. Maneul: Well, and it’s very interesting the way that they kind of adopted it as well, right? So finding something that filled your skillset and then just the way that they implemented it wasn’t just, well, I’m just a Spanish teacher and that’s all you’re teaching.

Jessica: Right, they had that also for primary instruction, and then they had the supplement with the classroom teachers who had the Spanish background.

Manuel: And how long did you spend teaching?

Jessica: Two years, because the first year I was there, I thought, you know, you get your feet under you, you get some experience. The second year I was there, I was also expecting my very first child, because, you know, that’s what you do, right? Married, you got a degree, you got a job. Okay, now you have your kid. Well, I was on a field trip with my class when I went into labor, and I’m like, I think I might be having contractions here and I’m not due for another month. So I was really not ready. That was an interesting challenge of, I’m on a field trip with the students, I can’t just get up and leave, but I think I’m in labor. So I had to wait till we got back to the school building to address that, called it in, and they said, yes, you need to leave now. Oh, I can’t just finish out the day, there’s only another, no, you need to leave now. Okay, had my first child, was a wonderful experience. She was very small, five pounds, one ounce, almost preemie, 36 weeks along. We joked that she wanted to see Santa because she was born a week before Christmas. Like, she just really wanted to see Santa. That’s why she came early. I thought for sure I was gonna go late, but no, she had other ideas. Went back to work after that, after my six weeks of leave. I found that I was hoping she’d go to sleep at night so I could grade papers and do lesson plans and do the work because teaching isn’t a 40 hour a week job, especially when you’re still building your curriculum up. That the first year I taught third and fourth grade, and the second year I taught fifth and sixth graders. I had all new curriculum each time starting from scratch. Well, I didn’t think that was the right balance. Like, I didn’t have my daughter just to hope she goes to sleep so I can do work. That felt really wrong to me. At the end of the school year, it was time to find something new. So I got a temp job. You know, like office temp, the old staffing company days, because I’d done office work prior to my undergrad and I knew I could do that type of work. I’m like, well, I’d done bookkeeping, I’ve done general office administration, I can do that. So I landed a temp job, 40 hours a week. Sweet, this is what I can work with. I started there and after two weeks, I wondered why nobody had talked to me. It was very odd, except for the person that had brought me in. And one of the ladies came by one day and she leaned in. She’s like, how are you doing? I’m like, fine. Do you know why no one’s talking to you? I’m like, no, you know, tell me. Just because the last person was here for two weeks threw their arms in the air, said I can’t take it anymore and stormed out of the building. And we didn’t want to lose you too. I’m like, I had to laugh. Like seriously? I’m like, oh my gosh, really? That job started temp, became permanent. They offered me a permanent position and I took it. I stayed there for almost six years. While I was there working in the R&D organization, my boss was managing their portfolio projects, which had about 150 active projects, but they weren’t working on all 150 at one time because the staff wasn’t that large. Within that portfolio, there were 75 that were prioritized and then they had to figure out within there, who does what, what resources, budgets, and all of that work of planning them against each other to figure out what should they spend time on. And they were doing this in an Excel spreadsheet. I’m like, we could probably build a database for that. He’s like, you can? Yeah, you can figure it out. This was in the days of Microsoft Access, Access 95 to be very specific, built an access database, asked for some additional training, one day class at the community college and took out lots of books at the library because no, we didn’t have Google. We didn’t have Chat GPT to code it for us. I had to learn. I’m like, oh, Visual Basic. It’s a lot like BASIC. Enough gears clicked into place. It wasn’t too bad. I built a database. We used it with the folks in Ireland as well as the folks here in the US. And as opportunities came up, I would do that a lot. Hey, yeah, I can figure that out. I don’t know how to do it yet, but I can figure it out. Sure, I’ll try that. Got to be part of the group doing a request for proposal to bring in formal project management software because enterprise project management software was becoming more mature at this point. Got to bring it in, help form the PMO and administer the PMO tools. Set up two computers where we were running processes at my desk so I could run processes on the one computer and check email and do other things on the other computer. And I used these two hands to show that because on this computer, I would left mouse. On this computer, I would right mouse. So I’d know which computer I was on. (laughter) Because otherwise, that was, I needed the physical kind of the intentionality of that physical separation to go, oh, okay, this computer does these things, this computer does those things. And I did that job for a little while. And because that wasn’t something that had existed at the organization, they didn’t quite know what to call me or what to pay me.

Manuel: In that role, there’s two things, the constant volunteering, the understanding that you’ll figure it out. Do you feel that a lot of your background kind of helped prepare you for that? You mentioned you moved around a lot. So you were okay with, I guess, being uncomfortable, being in situations where you’re like, well, this is new, I’m gonna have to figure it out.

Jessica: Yes, I think it did.

Manuel: And then the other question I have is, in the temp office job, it almost sounds like based on the fact that you’re doing, at least you had done in college, calculus, a lot of this, it’s the best word to say this, advanced mathematics. Did you feel like, oh, just a regular temp office job, there wasn’t enough of a challenge. So would you say that those were kind of two of the things that helped drive you to say, I wanna do more. One, I need a challenge. And two, I’m okay being uncomfortable with something I don’t know.

Jessica: I think the challenge was a major issue for me because initially stepping in the job, like, well, it’s a good enough job, right? Cause sometimes that’s what you need. It’s good enough, it’ll pay the bills. It’s good enough for now. I also recognized that that wasn’t my end goal. Like good enough is a place to start, but it’s not where I wanna land. And I started thinking about what I wanted to do. So I also went back to school, recognizing that my elementary ed degree wasn’t going to open doors and give me options. What degree was gonna give me options that would allow me to do whatever I needed to do in any industry? I went for an MBA, Master’s in Business Administration. I got it all online while I was working this job. And I was still young enough to give up on sleep because that’s what I chose to give up on. I didn’t give up on time with my daughter. I didn’t give up on time with my job. I took care of my family after she’d go to bed, you know, 10, 11 o’clock at night. I’d stay up till two in the morning, three in the morning if I had to, occasionally pulling the all nighter to do my homework on the dial up modem with yes, you remember the static, yes, we had those that were real. I was doing my Master’s degree online from an early online college, University of Phoenix. So this was again, the late 90s. Went back to school for my Master’s degree because I knew that my elementary ed degree was narrow. It works in that one lane. But an MBA, you can get a management job in any industry. It gives you options. And a lot of the jobs in the fields, because I started looking at job postings, how do you know what’s required? You look at what’s out there. Would have a degree in XYZ or business administration. And business administration was almost always the or. So they want you to have a specialty degree or one in business administration. I’m like, if I get a Master’s degree, because why get another Bachelor’s? You got to go up, right? That should give me more options. Then I can start picking my path and having more choices and I won’t get filtered out when people are selecting people. Okay, who am I gonna interview? Who am I gonna talk to? And that’s where I went with the Master’s degree. And I think that’s also partially why my boss gave me the option to have additional opportunities. Cause he saw that I was learning more. I was reading his Harvard business reviews that would come. I was reading the magazines that came in and highlighting the articles that would be of interest for him. So it was part of my job. But I was also talking to him about those articles, giving him ideas and input. And he saw that, recognized it and gave me more opportunities, especially when he saw that I do this. Yeah, I don’t know, but I’ll figure it out. And I do, I think that the moving and always having to change went with that. I did also learn much later in life that I have Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. And often with that comes a tendency towards addiction. I found out what my brain’s addicted to, learning. Because it gets the novelty from the learning and constantly learning. And because it’s channeled in that direction, I’m hardwired for that in a way that a lot of people either are not or can never be.

Manuel: You’re right. I never thought about the correlation of addiction. And it is an addiction or a lot of times I also call it like a hyper focus. And that hyper focus is that, right? Like if you can, you’ll get addicted to something and it’s like a nonstop until that novelty wears off. And then it’s, okay, what’s the next thing? I also, I wasn’t formally diagnosed until, you know, just within the last couple of years, but looking back, similar to yourself, you look back and you’re like, that’s why I couldn’t, just things that were monotonous to me. I just, I couldn’t deal with it. And I was also looking for a challenge. And if I couldn’t get it there, I’m gonna start reading. I’m gonna start, you know, educating myself or picking up another skill. Unfortunately, most of the times it was just what was interesting to me, not so much what would be valuable in the workforce.

Jessica: But there’s benefit to both because by picking up skills that are interesting to you that aren’t related to your job directly, you’re thinking about the world differently. You’re building a different perspective and that helps you bridge different domains and make connections that other people might not. You don’t think of cooking and tech. You don’t think of, well, one of my hobbies, rock hounding and tech. There’s no direct relationship. It forces you though to think differently about things. And it helps your brain be more elastic, making connections that are not necessarily intuitive. That may even make you feel a little bit like MacGyver when you figure out how to put a bunch of different pieces that you think would never go together, putting them all together to solve a problem in a unique way.

Manuel: And I like that concept of kind of putting things together that don’t go together, that you would think don’t go together.

Jessica: Right?

Manuel: Because I had a previous guest that talked about a book called “Rebel Ideas.” And it’s, the premise is a lot of that, is having the ability to work with different people and have diverse thinking, but it also can be from an individual standpoint. Understand that, okay, I have this passion for rock hounding or I have this passion for whatever it may be, but I also know tech. Well, guess what? If I have the passion for it, there might be a few other people that do as well. And you kind of find your tribe.

Jessica: You do. I will say that the Gethersom members are not rock hounds, but boy, is that a fun tribe of people to talk to about tech. (laughing) Manuel; From the different things that you’ve done so far, and I know that you mentioned primary education is not a field that you can, sorry, it’s not a degree that you can kind of use to be able to go into other industries, but did a lot of that knowledge of going through and kind of building curriculum, being able to teach, you know, it may seem like a simple concept, but again, to an elementary school student, this is brand new, understanding how to explain things simply, and the reason I’m bringing this up, and I know I’m gonna kind of jump ahead a little bit, is the workshop

Jessica: Exactly.

Manuel: Being able to think and how to explain things to other people, you know, just in the couple conversations we’ve had before, like I see that now. Like I see the way that you are able to kind of tell a story, the way that you’re able to, you know, it hasn’t come up here, but explain concepts in a way that most people are able to understand and say, “Oh, okay, I’m sure like to the rock hounding, telling them tech and not making them feel like, well, I don’t have a technical degree, or that’s not my industry, I don’t care,” but you probably make it enjoyable to them.

Jessica: I do, and the elementary education, the structure of how you design to get information conveyed and help make it retained, definitely provided a foundation. I will give Toastmasters credit though for building on it in a way of really framing your public speaking in terms of what’s your audience going to be interested in? Because if you’re not giving the audience something they need, they’re gone. (laughs) Plain and simple. I’ll give you a really good example. AI, it’s scary, it’s complicated, it’s new. Well, actually it’s not new. The term was invented in a paper in 1955. Not new. Oh, by the way, I guarantee you, you used AI before we started calling it that. Have you ever used those interactive voice response phones where you press one for English, two for the next transaction, and you keep hoping you could actually speak to a real person, but you have to keep pressing all these stupid buttons?

Manuel: Yeah.

Jessica: That’s AI. It’s an expert decision tree. It’s a set of rules. It is an early form of artificial intelligence. You’ve used it. You used it before you knew what the term was. Well, so is it scary anymore? No. I try to make things relatable to existing hooks in our brain because then you have a place to put it. It’d be like if you had only a path for cats and you were Pepe Le Pew and everything that’s black and white is a cat. Well, wait, not everything that’s black and white is a cat. Some of them are skunks. Well, how do I know if it’s a skunk? Well, a cat will have the pointed ears, may or may not have a stripe, and its fur tends to be soft. A skunk, like a cat, similar in size, may be also black and white, may have that stripe, but has rounded ears and has coarser fur, and the tail is generally bushier. You’ve now got a cat and a skunk tree that you’ve built in parallel, but you’ve hooked it to existing knowledge, so you have a place to put it and relate it, rather than have to start, “Oh, I have to find a place for this information to go.” It’s not connected to anything. And when you’re building on existing knowledge, you’re building on a foundation, and it makes it so much easier to take it in to learn it. And deal with it.

Manuel: With all of this knowledge that you’re gathering, you’re doing a lot within your role. And I know one of the things that you had kind of mentioned to me is throughout your entire career, being a consultant. And I know that we’re not gonna be able to kind of get through every role that you’ve been through.

Jessica: Yeah, I’ve got an Nascar slide for that.

Manuel: The one thing that I did find very fascinating is throughout that entire career progression, career migration, journey, whatever we wanna call it, you mentioned that, I’m gonna try and remember the conversation as best I can, you had never been without employment, at least not involuntary.

Jessica: Correct, two weeks. It was in between 1993 and pretty much, yeah, today. I have never been involuntarily unemployed for longer than two weeks. And the stretch of two weeks was because as I was wrapping up one contract, the company that wanted me couldn’t take me for an extra two weeks, so I had to wait.

Manuel: It’s involuntary, but it seems like it was just more of a waiting period more than involuntarily. Throughout that time, I know that we’ve touched a little bit on the workshop, but what are the techniques that you used to be able to continue doing that? We’ve talked about you being able to be open to opportunities. You’re willing to kind of speak up, you’re willing to challenge yourself. You also have the ability to teach others, because you built this access database, now you have to teach other people how to use it. There’s a number of different things. Are those the areas that you feel helped you throughout that entire process, or are there other skills that you picked up along the way?

Jessica: Planning is definitely a supportive skill. As I founded the project management office, developing those project management skills, one of them is you’re planning your activities of what you’re gonna do when you’re gonna get it done. Another one is risk mitigation. You’re understanding what are the risks, and in my brain I always think about, the goal is to how do I avoid pain and suffering? I don’t like pain and suffering, I don’t like it at all. I want to avoid it as much as possible. Well that means, in my world view, unemployment is pain and suffering. As I started looking at jobs, I took contract jobs. I was a consultant, and I use the air quotes because it’s really, it’s temporary work, only you’re on a contract, you’re not actually consulting like Deloitte, you’re hired to do a role. The first role I got to do was my old job, because as I was leaving, they asked me to stick around a little extra so they could backfill me, and they kept me there an extra three or four months. I told the contract house that I was working with, I said, “I’m telling you, they’re not gonna look for somebody to take over this job until I leave. They’re willing to pay you more than they were willing to pay me, and I’m still getting half again what I was making before.” And you know there’s markup. So they’re willing to pay a lot of money to a contract house to keep my skills. It’s a very odd situation. But they aren’t gonna go ahead and make the effort to bring someone in until I have a date to leave. We’ve got to cut this, otherwise I’m just gonna be doing the same work, I’m not gonna get new skills. They found me a contract opportunity. I interviewed for a whole bunch of these e-commerce project manager jobs, but they wanted people who already had experience managing e-commerce. But e-commerce was new. I’m like, “So wait a minute. You won’t hire me as a project manager for an e-commerce project unless I have e-commerce experience. But I can’t get e-commerce experience unless somebody hires me to do project management for an e-commerce project.” It felt like a catch-22. I expressed this to the contract house after one interview that had, I could tell when I left. I’m like, “I wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted somebody who already had this experience.” Maybe a week or two later, the contract house comes back and they said, “Well, what do you think about QA?” My software quality assurance. “I don’t know. I’ve never done it. What is it?” They gave me maybe a one or two sentence description. I went into interview. This was with Fingerhut. They needed somebody who could test fingerhut.com en Español. I went into the interview and I explained, honestly, I’d never done that before, but here’s what I did with my Access database. Here’s what I kind of think you need to do. I feel confident I can figure it out. I did state that. I could learn how to do this. It’s a skill like any other. It’s not like something that requires physical strength that I cannot acquire instantly. Knowledge is easy in my brain. Okay, I can figure it out and I had the minor in Spanish. Lo and behold, my Spanish gets me job number two. I’m now working in e-commerce for Fingerhut, learning software quality assurance from a team of people who were kind enough to share their knowledge with me. This group of folks, we were very close. We stayed together for about a year and a half. While I was there, we all watched the Twin Towers come down together one morning and we just sat in horrified silence, watching this transpire because we were typically at the office early. It was quite the period of time that team and I were really close and I actually got to work with a few of them at future jobs because I said, “Hey, you should hire these people,” and they did.

Manuel: That’s something that a lot of us have probably gone through, right? Building that… People call it network, but in this case, it’s really a relationship. You build a relationship with somebody. You work with them enough to know what their skill set is and that you can get along because that’s the other thing. You could be the smartest person, get all your work done, but if you’re not somebody pleasurable to be around, I don’t know that I want to recommend you. I didn’t enjoy working with you at my last role. You would be a perfect fit except I don’t want to have to work with you.

Jessica: Yeah, so the job I went to after Fingerhut… The timing on Fingerhut was they were sold and basically folding up operations in January of 22. Well, I happened to also be pregnant with my second child at that point in time, and one week before all the contractors were done, I delivered. Huzzah… I stayed employed through that. I had maternity leave after that. My next job was also software QA at Moneygram International. I was there for about a year and a half. I learned how to take WinRunner and apply it to a DOS application, which people who know both tools are going to look at you funny when you say that. Like, how did you build a test automation script with a GUI dependent, meaning it needs the user interface dependent tool when you’re looking at a DOS application? And it was interesting, and I got to figure out how to do that. Working with colleagues there, we got this robust set of test scripts automated for WinRunner in this DOS application that was used for money transfer services. I spent a lot of time in one of my colleagues’ cubes. I worked with him again later, too. [laughs] It was interesting because I was there for about a year and a half. I felt like it was time to move on because I was getting very much pigeonholed into quality assurance. I hadn’t had the project management roles that I was hoping to. Still working for the same contract house that I’d been at since I left. Boston Scientific Scimed, which was where I got to found the PMO. There was an interview at US Bank. And the director brought me in, interviewed me for a project management job. Well, one of the people she worked with knew me from Fingerhut. And told her, “You want to bring her in. You want to hire her.” And it was a six to eight week contract, and I was there for a little more than a year. And they hired two full-time people to replace me when I left. Oh, did that feel good? [laughs]

Manuel: And I’m sure it really did feel good, right? Knowing that the work that you’re doing is so good that it takes two people to backfill. But then at the same time, did you also feel that… Maybe not that you should have got the salary of two people, but within a contract role, being able to go through different contracts and now establishing your skillset, knowing that you can learn what you don’t know. Is this something that when it comes towards finding the next contract, and I know it’s going through a contract house, are they able to negotiate more for you and have the ability to bring you into bigger roles?

Jessica: Yes. The more you can demonstrate those skills and have… When the customer wants to keep you, that speaks well for your skills and that builds your brand. I was actually… It was a different contract company when I was at US Bank because my contract house didn’t have the relationship and couldn’t find me a project management job. But I found it with another one. Okay. Still works. When I left there, again, those skills that you gather from being a contractor, the mindset that makes you a really good contractor is that any day could be my last day. Any day I walk in could be my last day at that job because you’re a contractor, which means you’re always on the lookout for the next job because you want to stay employed, and you keep your documentation tidy so that if you walked away tomorrow, they’d be able to figure out what you left, what you did, and use that information to train, and they are not left in a lurch. That’s when you’ve done a good job as a contractor. Not everyone thinks that way. A lot of people think about it as temporary employment. It’s like, “Yes, and.” If you can leave them well off, even if they suddenly have to terminate you for no fault of your own, budgets get cut. It happens a lot. That’s why they have temporary employees. They have contractors because you can let go of a contractor. No severance, no press releases, no notification periods. You can just make them go away very quickly. That’s the trade-off. Generally, when you’re working as a contractor, you do get compensated highly. You get paid a little better. Your hourly rate is higher than the employees you’re working with in many cases because you’re taking that risk. Because they can make you go away at any point in time. It’s a trade-off. You have to be comfortable with that trade-off. As I went through contract and occasionally taking permanent roles, because they’re not really permanent, because I went back to MoneyGram. Back in the QA space, they wanted to hire me as a QA lead. Then they promoted me to a supervisor. Then they promoted me to a manager. I had the opportunity to manage people. It’s also while I was there that I was introduced to Toastmasters.

Manuel: That’s a very interesting point that you bring up. Because I think a lot of times we think that we have to have a permanent role. I’ve seen a lot of those contract roles. Sometimes it’s a six to nine month contract or it’s a contract to hire. I had interviews for a couple of those, but not really understanding the complete benefits. Because you see it as, “Well, I can get let go.” But if you reframe it and say, “Okay, I can let go, but I can get let go.” But during that time, during these six months, these nine months, the amount of skills that I can pick up, Understanding different industries. I really like the idea of building the documentation. I’ve done that in roles that I didn’t discover until probably midway through my career. That would free me up to move on to another role.

Jessica: Yes, then you’re not stuck.

Manuel: You’re not stuck there. You’re like, “Oh, well, you’re the person that knows how to do that.” I’m like, “I am, but I can teach somebody.” Or I can write up documentation and say, “Hey, follow this.” Eventually, that was very helpful because there were blind spots that I would discover. I would hand this off and someone would come back and be like, “What about here to here?” It’s steps one, two, three, but when I try to go to four, there’s something missing. Then you understand that, “Oh, well, there’s actually three other steps there that I know how to do or I took for granted that everybody knew.”

Jessica: You didn’t think about them because you’d ingrained them through habit.

Manuel: Exactly. I’m glad that you’ve had such a great experience and you’re sharing a lot of this knowledge so that people can go through and say, “Well, maybe I’m open to these contract roles.” You don’t see it as like, “Well, temporary, I’m not good enough to be at a permanent role.” You can. You want to establish yourself to where they do want to hire you, but maybe you want to continue moving around and building.

Jessica: Maybe you don’t want to be at that company. I like to think about it as you get to try before you buy too. When you’re on a contract role, you get to understand the culture of the company without being constrained to stay. For example, you’re on a six-month contract. At the end of six months, if the client wants you to stay but you want to go, you can leave if you don’t like that environment. I had a contract like that where I was brought in to do a role that was supposed to be process improvement, help them understand agile practices, move things forward, and provide recommendations on what to do to improve the processes. As that contract was wrapping up, they had demonstrated they didn’t actually want to do the things that they were being told that would improve the processes. They would just wanted to say they were going to do it. So as that contract was wrapping up, they wanted me to stay. I’m like, “No, I don’t want to stay because if you want to improve processes, I think that’s fine.” If you want to say you want to improve processes but you don’t actually want to do those things, I think that’s frustrating and I need to leave. You need to hire somebody who wants to work in this environment and that’s not me.

Manuel: And it is two ways and you actually get that try before you buy as opposed to just interviewing them during an interview and trying to figure that out. You actually get to live it.

Jessica: Right. What aren’t they telling you? Oh, they say they want to do this. They don’t actually live it.

Manuel: So then as you become a manager, you discover Toastmasters.

Jessica: Yeah.

Manuel: And how did that come about and was it because you want to be able to improve your communication to the people that you’re helping lead?

Jessica: Well, our trainer, the corporate trainer we had at MoneyGram wanted to form a Toastmasters club. He decided to found one. We didn’t have one prior. He was founding a corporate club on the premises. Presume folks. Had to be in person and he was kind of rounding up people who might want to do that. It’s focused on communication and leadership skills. This was early on when I hadn’t been in that leadership role for very long. Like, well, if it’s leadership skills and communication skills. Good leadership skills are very important to have, especially if you want to move up. And I did. Got to try these other things. And communication skills are so vital for everything you do. Mine is not communication is not a strength for me. I know this about myself. And it will never be a true strength. Something that just comes naturally. I needed it to not be a liability. I needed to be strong enough that I could go into meetings and get the point across and get listened to, despite the fact that sometimes people would ignore me based on my gender. Oh, well. Get those points across. Clearly communicate. Deal with those situations when I was being ignored simply because of my gender. In an effective way that would get the work done. And Toastmasters was a vehicle to do that. You’re developing leadership skills. One of the huge lessons out of Toastmasters from a leadership perspective is in Toastmasters. When you’re trying to get things done, you recognize that everybody’s a volunteer, right? They’re trying to figure out how to work this in with everything else. Take a step back at work when you’re trying to get things done and you need people to help you. They’re volunteering too. Everyone volunteers their discretionary effort at work. They choose to help you or not. They choose how much effort they’re going to put into that activity. So if you approach it like they’re volunteering, they don’t have to. You can’t make them. You’re approaching that person from a very different mindset. You respect them as an individual. They have a choice. You recognize they have a choice. They don’t have to help you. But if you’re honest about, “Hey, I need your help. I can’t do this myself,” or “This is really important for you to do this work because XYZ,” you’re explaining it to them. You’re giving them enough information. They can make an informed decision. You get the best out of people almost every time because you’re recognizing that they volunteer their effort. Yes, they’re paid to be there. They volunteer their effort. It’s a huge mindset shift in how you work with people who report to you when you see them as volunteers, not as staff or worse yet, resources.

Manuel: And even outside of being their leader, I like that idea of even just with your co-workers. It’s a negotiation. I’ve always seen this as a negotiation, but understanding that they’re volunteers because if I have a project or if I’m working on something and you have a skill set that could help me or that is required to complete this project, me just telling you, “Hey, I need you to do this,” that’s not going to get them to say, “Yeah, let me help you.”

Jessica: Or the boss told me to have you do this.

Manuel: Hey, the boss told me to do this. But if you can go through and explain it to them, you have this unique skill set. It would really help me if you could do this. I always did it as a negotiation. If you can help me out on this and help me get past this, let me know if there’s anything I can do for you. Or depending on how quickly you get this done, maybe I can help you with X, Y, and Z. But now seeing it from a volunteer standpoint and just trying to get them, “How do I get you to volunteer? How do I communicate the importance of this so that you want to do it, not feel that you have to do it?”

Jessica: And discretionary effort is our best effort, right? We choose to put ourselves into it to get it done right. And if somebody is not putting forth their best effort, the quality is going to suffer.

Manuel: Yeah, I mean, I’ve seen it.

Jessica: Right, you’ve seen it.

Manuel: I’m thinking back of different situations, and you get that. When maybe they did it, it got the job done. It was what was required or what you asked. But that was all that you got. You didn’t get that extra effort to where had they put in that level of effort of they wanted to do it or that discretionary effort, it could have been so much better. So obviously Toastmasters is helping you with this. You are putting together a nice body of work. You continue to learn outside of Toastmasters and just picking up skills on the job or as required. Do you do any type of reading for either self-improvement? Are there books that you…

Jessica: You hit the magic word for me. You said reading. In an average year before school, while I’m in school, it’s a little slower. I would typically read over 300 books in an average year. I learned that the library’s max was 100 books, and I was very sad when they cut it back to 50. I devour books. I’ve read since I was small. It was the ultimate treat to go to the library where I could get any book I wanted. I had to bring it back, but then I was done reading it, so it worked. I can get a new one. And I’ve read since I was very, very small. I take in information really well from reading information. So I read a lot. I read a volume that most people would consider absurd. My kids used to call it the book sound when I was highly focused on a book. Not all books are intense about learning, but yes, I read tons. I read volumes and volumes and volumes. When I first had to interview people, I didn’t know how to conduct an interview. I’m like, okay, I’m a contractor, and I’m supposed to interview people who were to take over for my job. How do I do this well? I don’t know. So what do I do? Me being me, I go to the library, find 12 books, and read them all. And from those 12 books, I synthesized what I felt were the most effective options, the best questions, the right approach for how to get questions and ask things during an interview. That’s the way my brain actually functions. It’s a strange thing. As it turns out, that’s not normal for everyone. And I didn’t realize that until I was probably in my 30s before I realized that the way I processed information was not normal for everyone. Everybody’s brain doesn’t work that way. I’m like, oh.

Manuel: Do you do any type of note-taking as part of that? Because I thought I started reading quite a bit. In the last few years, I’ve made more of a concerted effort. I’ve always enjoyed reading, and I would say I thought I was getting ambitious. At one point, I was going to try and hit 50 books in a year.

Jessica: That’s more typical of people.

Manuel: One of the things that I’ve noticed, and there are times where I have to go maybe back to a book to reference, I didn’t. I was so focused on reading the book, getting the knowledge for, again, you talked about interviewing. I’m going to synthesize these 12 books, and I would do things like that repeatedly. But then I would probably retain long-term retention a fraction of that information, which I understand is normal. But there’s times where I would want to recall this, and I talked to a good friend of mine, and he actually has a process that he goes through now as he’s reading them, taking notes and synthesizing that and having it for long-term retention, and he makes a concerted effort to go back to a lot of that information. Now you’re reading hundreds of books, I know that that’s not doable for all of the books, but are there ones that kind of stick out in your mind and do you have a process for, “These are key things that I want to make sure I jot down,” or “I don’t want to forget because I want to revisit this in two years,” or the next time a specific opportunity for me to apply this information?

Jessica: When there’s something like, “I’ll pick on the interviewing skills,” I would write down the pieces that stuck out to me. I was like, “Okay, these are the ones I want to write and record, and I want to keep that.” I’d write those pieces down. When I write down information, my brain is really pretty good at retaining that over time once I write it down. If I just hear it, whoosh! But when I write it down, there’s something about that process that helps it stick better in my brain. When I wanted to compile the information, I’ll write down the pieces and then I’ll have at the end an end product that I can use. For other kinds of information that I’m going to consider, less technical skills like communication skills, there’s a series of books that VitalSmarts put together, Crucial Conversations, Crucial Accountability, I think is what it’s called now. It’s focused on skills for having tough conversations. I wrote stuff down and I remember them. However, I revisit those every few years. I’ve got the audio CDs that came with them because those concepts are so important to really hone and practice. Sometimes when you practice skills and you’re not getting feedback unlike in Toastmasters, and you’re not getting feedback on those skills, you can get a little rusty or get some bad habits. I take a step back every few years and I’ll go through those CDs and listen to the stories or reread, revisit that content to remind myself, this is how you have a productive conversation when you’re trying to get to the root of a problem that doesn’t trigger defensiveness, that allows you to get to the solution without accidentally causing problems for the other person, because you don’t mean to. You can’t come at it. Key one is don’t assume you know why something happened. Start with the, “All right, I need to understand. You did something different than what I expected. Is it because I failed to clarify what I needed or because your thought process was completely different from mine and it made total sense in your head, even though it didn’t make total sense in my head, and it was just one of those disconnects because we didn’t clearly communicate.” That’s going to go a lot further than you screwed up because you start that conversation and that’s not going to go well for anybody. Not with your kid, maybe your dog because they don’t really understand what you’re saying. You need to start from an understanding of what happened. Where’s the disconnect?

Manuel: I like that idea of kind of revisiting. The reason I bring that up is that’s something that I can’t remember again. It’s just that remembering part is if I had read it or if I saw it in a video, heard it in a podcast, is there’s certain skills or there’s certain knowledge that you come across that should be revisited. I understand now how you’re going about it and just writing it down. I think that might be something that I need to reincorporate because you’re right. There’s something about that tactile physically writing it down, even if it’s on, I would say even like on an iPad. It doesn’t have to be, but you actually writing it out as opposed to typing the notes because I’ve done that. I’ve done the typing the notes.

Jessica: Typing the notes doesn’t work for my brain either. It’s like whoosh.

Manuel: I love the Kindle because I love physical books and I have some, but there’s something about the portability of Kindle and I highlight all kinds of stuff. I will PDF those to myself. I try to again organize them as digital notes to review, but it doesn’t work the same. You would think I would have made that connection because when I study for certification exam, for technical knowledge, things that I don’t get right or then I just need to reinforce, I would write it down, but not with this other type of learning.

Jessica: Right. And like with a lot of the research I was doing for my dissertation proposal, I was reading electronic materials and it’s harder for my brain to take notes on those electronic materials, but I started building at least a little bit of the skill set to do that in small chunks. And I can do it for concepts that were broad and that I already had a foundation for. But if it was something new, I really needed to write it down in a notebook on a piece of paper, very old fashioned, because that helps it. It was just enough to help it stick.

Manuel: And do you keep those notebooks over time? I mean, is it something?

Jessica: Sometimes.

Manuel: Sometimes. Yeah, sometimes I do keep them, but I almost never look at them again. Again, for my brain, when I write it down, usually it sticks and it sticks really well. I’m fortunate in that regard. I was kind of the memory keeper at home as a kid. You know, where are my keys? Oh, they’re over there. That was that was part of my role as a child was to find the things that were lost because I remember where stuff was. But certain other kinds of things don’t stick as well. And I have to be more intentional about that. Or if it’s something where I need a very specific detail and the detail itself matters, I usually have to look that up. Concepts, no problem. Exact quote, I’ll look it up. Again, detail. I’ll absolutely have to look that up because I want to be sure I’ve got it right. And I’ve got the inattentive type attention deficit. So the detail can elude me unintentionally and I don’t realize it. It’s one of those little tricks my brain plays on me. Fortunately, I always check and double check, which is one of my risk mitigation strategies to reduce the likelihood I mess something up.

Manuel: And just again, to kind of dig a little bit deeper on this topic, because it’s something that’s of interest to me is what is the process you do to take those notes? So I know that you’re handwriting them, but are you summarizing? Are you, you know, if there’s a particular and I understand that the context is going to be very dependent on what type of reading or what type of notes. Are you summarizing? Are you rewriting exactly maybe two sentences? I’m just curious because note taking is something that there’s a book that a friend of mine recommended. I can’t think of the name of it right now, but it’s like I think it’s Taking Smart Notes. So I’m just curious how you develop that skill and what you what process you do to determine what type of note you need to write down.

Jessica: For academic research, these are the easiest ones to answer, right? The academic research papers, I’ll typically key findings. I’ll note key findings of that paper or the aspect of the paper that is particularly relevant, like the framework or the theory that was used to present the paper may be particularly relevant. I’ll grab that from reference books or nonfiction books. It’s the stuff that sticks out to me as the ahas. If it’s, yeah, I’ve heard that six times before, I’m not going to write it down. I’m not going to summarize the whole thing because that’s boring and irritating. But, oh, this is really interesting. I want to remember that. That’s what I write down. I don’t need the whole story or the summary of the book for the purposes to which I wish to apply the information. So it’s always based on what am I going to do with it determines what I grab from it. If I’m looking at I’m just getting some context, some ideas, this is interesting. I may write nothing down because it reinforces things I’ve heard six times. One thing you’ll notice over the years is that a lot of leadership theories do this little pendulum between, yeah, micromanaging and kind of let go, let laissez-faire management. It’s a pendulum. Ideally, you’d have balance and it would be wonderful. It tends to swing. Right now, you’ve got more micromanagement going on in the workforce with people being observed and tracked all the time. It will gradually, the pendulum will swing back the other way. When it’s something like that where you see you’ve seen these patterns over time. Like, I don’t need to write that down. I’ve seen it six times.

Manuel: You’re just calling it something different.

Jessica: Yeah, you’re using a different set of vocabulary so you can market your strategy and people will pay you money. Got it. I don’t need to write that down. So it really varies a lot in some of the AI stuff like, oh, this is interesting to note. I need to remember this piece of information about the way the tool works or a nuance that I hadn’t thought about. I’m going to write that down. I might never look at it yet, but I’m going to write that down to encode it in my brain. I have a friend whose brain works the opposite way. She’s like, yeah, if I write it down, I’ve given my brain permission to forget it. I’m like, oh, wow. That’s completely different. Wow. And it’s a very… For me, that would be really challenging. I’m like, yeah, I write it down to encode it and remember it. And if you write it down, you’ve given your brain permission to let go of it all together. I’m like, oh, this is funny.

Manuel: This goes to reinforce how we’re all different, right? Everybody thinks the same, you know, not everybody thinks the same, not everybody can do the exact same, you know, activities and get the same results.

Jessica: I think that’s a blessing.

Manuel: A hundred percent.

Jessica: So many people don’t realize that what they’re really intuitively good at, it’s easy for them, right? It comes naturally. Those are your strengths. They’re easy. And they don’t appreciate that those strengths of theirs are skills that not everyone has. They take it for granted because it’s easy for them. They don’t realize that what comes easy to them that they take for granted because it’s always come easy is something that’s very difficult for others. And when you’re working with groups of people, then you can put those skills together so that you have a good team that can handle any situation. Doesn’t matter what happens. They can adjust because you have all the skills you need. But one person alone cannot have a strength in everything. It’s not possible, just like perfection isn’t possible, but progress always is. (laughs)

Manuel: You’ve shared a lot, which I’m again, I’m very grateful, but I want to also give you the opportunity to talk a little bit about the workshop that you’ve built around career and career resilience. I want to make sure that we set some time for you to kind of tell us a little bit more about that because I definitely don’t want to run out.

Jessica: Well, this workshop I was asked to custom build for master’s students in the Industrial and Organizational Psychology program at Vanguard University. And this was in 2018. Like 2018? Is that when it was? Oh, no, it had to be more recent than that because I was living here. Okay, it was recently. Sorry. Time is not something that my ADHD brain is really, really good with. I did publish it on my research gate profile so you can go there and it will have the actual year that I did this. It was recently. We’ll go with that. As I was designing this workshop, I was thinking about what has enabled me to stay employed. Again, I’m avoiding risk. I don’t want to have to be unemployed when I don’t want to be unemployed. I have bills to pay, you know, throughout my adult life until 2020. I had responsibility for ensuring that my children had a roof over their head, everything they needed. I took that very seriously. That was not a risk I was willing to take, that I was going to be without the funds required to give my children what they needed. What are those skills? Well, a lot of them are transferable. You look at what employers are looking for. There’s things I can teach you and there’s things that I can’t teach you easily when you come into a job. For a process, I can teach you the process by which we file a particular set of papers or a process that is step by step to accomplish a goal at this role. I can’t teach you to ask questions when you don’t understand. I can’t teach you to think beyond the task to what might be happening before or after this that is context that is relevant to you, to your understanding of how to really be effective in the role. I can’t teach you to think beyond. I can’t teach you how to play nice with others in the office. If I have to do that, we’re both having really uncomfortable conversations. You need to come to the office with the ability to adjust, to interact well with others, to collaborate with your teammates, to know when to ask for help. I’m really bad at remembering to ask for help. I’ll wait till the last possible minute probably because I estimate, “Oh, this is just a one-hour task and three hours later I’m drowning.” It happens. Remembering all of those things that are non-technical skills that you bring, those are important skills that are transferable regardless of industry and role. The ability is show up on time. You have a job, you’re supposed to be here on time, you show up on time on a regular basis. That sounds like kind of a gimme. It’s not. The understanding that when you come to work, you’re expected to behave in a certain way. That means you’re not splaying across the chairs, you’re not swearing like a sailor. Basic comportment in the office of what’s appropriate versus what you might have done in the dorm common room. Understanding that distinction of how you carry yourself at work and even understanding that your boss has expectations of them that you might never know about, but they weigh them down and they have people they’re answering to. If you fail to deliver, that not only reflects poorly on you, it reflects poorly on them. Thinking about all of those non-technical pieces are huge skills. Critical thinking, “Oh my gosh, critical thinking.” Somebody tells you what to do and maybe you’re missing a step in the process, like your example. But instead of asking about it, you just blindly follow the process. Well, that’s not critical thinking. You need to go back and ask for those additional steps. Figure out what’s missing. Think about it. Those are skills that you can bring to any job. And if you don’t have those skills, you’re not going to succeed at any job. Start there. When you’re looking at roles, think about what kind of flexibility you’re willing to have. I worked as a contractor. I took on project management, quality assurance. I learned Agile Scrum so I could do Scrum Master roles. I took on a little bit of business analyst opportunity. I wasn’t very good at that one, so I try not to do that. But I tried it. And usually they’ll be hiring for either a project management person or a Scrum Master. Usually one of those are pretty employable. But heck, if those aren’t hiring, software quality assurance was hiring. And I could pivot between the two. So if there’s no jobs here, there might be jobs there. Okay. Once I got into leadership roles, there’s a lot fewer of those jobs out on the planet. Let’s face it. Well, I don’t have to be in management. I can take an individual contributor role and I’m okay with that. Okay, how flexible are you willing to be to stay employed? You look at your trade-offs. I tried to always have options because the more options I have, the less likely that the outcome is going to be adverse. The more, if option A, B, or C will all get me to a happy outcome, then I only need one of them to work and I’m good. And I try to think about it that way. That’s a planning of your career. Having a variety of skills is really, really useful as well as having a variety of industries. They’ll tell you, “Oh, you need to have healthcare domain experience.” No, you don’t. But they think you do. Okay, you need to be able to explain to them why it doesn’t matter. I can learn your domain. I’ve learned airline. I’ve learned insurance. I’ve learned financial services, banking, medical device. They’re all very different industries, very different needs, but you learn them. Learning is the skill that underpins everything because you can learn any of those skills and you bring that everywhere you go. That openness to learning will get you a lot of opportunity because you’ll learn things like I did from one of my team members who was so kind. And I say this in sincerity. She would tell me when I’d done something stupid because I didn’t know I was new at being a supervisor. I’d worked with her at Fingerhut as she was teaching me about QA. Now she reports to me and I’m the supervisor in a QA organization. And she was kind enough and I still consider it great kindness to give me feedback I needed to hear. She wouldn’t do it in front of the room. She would do it privately. But wow, what a gift that feedback is. So you also need to be open to feedback. Oh, and where else do we get that? Toastmasters. Getting that practice and taking the feedback. That’s huge. People aren’t giving you feedback because they don’t like you. They’re giving you a gift of feedback so that you can learn and you can be more skilled. It’s a mindset. What are you getting? And then there’s the growth mindset that underpins all of it. Is there a skill I can’t learn? Probably not. Is there a skill I can’t be good at? Yeah, there’s a lot of those. (laughter)

Manuel: You can’t be good at it, but you would at least be able to have an understanding of it and know here’s why I’m not good at it or here’s where maybe there is a shortcoming. But again,

Jessica: Here’s where I need to find an expert who’s got those skills that I don’t have.

Manuel: Because it requires extensive amount of training or skills that I just I don’t have the time. I don’t have the passion. I don’t have the want to do.

Jessica: Yeah. And in terms of thinking about your options and in that workshop, the other thing is looking at the jobs you do want and not having one role. The more roles you have gives you those options. Right? What are the filters that are used on those job postings? So that’s how I arrived at my MBA because it was degree, degree, degree or business administration, degree, degree, degree or business administration degree. Okay. It’s the “or” in every one of these categories. All right. That’s my utility degree. What else do I need? Project management, PMP, certified project management professional was a filter on roles. At least it was in the 90s. All right. I need to get my PMP. So I got my certified project management professional credential and then I could get past that filter. What are the filters that they’re using because they’re getting inundated with resumes? But then also meeting people. Meet people like you. Meet people at these professional organizations because those people may not be the ones to connect you to directly to that role, that next job. But it makes you comfortable talking about your work with other people. You make new friends who are interesting, who don’t work with you now. Because that’s a narrow focus, right? You’re not always going to be at the same job. Some people stay at the same company for decades. That just was never me. And these interesting people will teach you things. They will see the world differently. So they’ll expand your horizons. And they may be that interesting person. You worked with it at a prior job who just happens to know the hiring manager and says, “Oh, yeah, they’d be great. You should hire them.” It’s all these different pieces put together. The professional associations, like for project managers, that’s huge because you can then learn best practices and you don’t have to make all the mistakes yourself.

Manuel: There was that saying a smart man learns from his mistakes, a wise man learns from the mistakes of others, right? And actually, I’m going to change that and say a smart person learns from their own mistakes and a wise person learns from the mistakes of others. So I know I’ve asked you a lot of questions. You’ve provided a lot of good information. I want to now kind of open it up to you and say, “Is there anything that I haven’t asked you or anything that you want to talk about that maybe you didn’t have the opportunity?” I really want to give you the chance to, you know, speak freely of anything that is of interest or that you think would be of value.

Jessica: I think the biggest mindset thing that people need to have is that sometimes the opportunity in front of you may not be appealing in and of itself, but it’s an opportunity that will lead to something else that is really interesting. So don’t be afraid to take those opportunities. Be that person who raises their hand because then you’re dependable, you’re reliable, and to your point, you don’t want to make yourself indispensable. So document that information. Write that down so that you can hand it off. Be ready for that next opportunity. Always keep the eye open for what’s next. Some people want to be happy and they say, “All right, I’m happy where I’m at.” Cool. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make new friends because you want to make new friends. We’re social creatures. If anything, COVID taught us that. Get out there, make new friends. That’ll still help you have friends who will be there to help you should the need arise and you are involuntarily let go because it happens a lot. And right now it’s a tough, tough time. And more people are getting laid off through no fault of their own. And the competition gets tighter. Well, when the competition’s tight and you’ve got a hundred people applying for a job, who’s getting through the filters? Usually somebody who knows someone. And those relationships you make strengthen your community. They give you support even if they don’t necessarily lead directly to that next opportunity. And I can’t say enough, the friends I’ve made are so cool. I’ve met so many interesting people through Toastmasters because it’s not tech focused. So I meet people who don’t work in tech. I meet people who see the world differently. Have I ever gotten a job because of Toastmasters? No. Yet I’m still in it. Because the goal is to learn. The goal isn’t to get the job. That’s just a bonus. Same with something like SIM. And building those relationships. And you have all these people to learn from. And that’s exciting. People want to be appreciated for who they are. And there’s so much to appreciate in everyone you meet. That’s what you should remember.

Manuel: I think that’s perfect. I mean, everything that you just kind of mentioned, I’ve done in spurts, but now doing it more consistent and with more intentionality. It’s been great. I mean, the amount of people that I have, again, I haven’t gotten any new jobs. And again, that wasn’t my goal. It was just to meet new and interesting people. I don’t go to this event. I never meet you. I don’t get to learn from you. And hopefully other people are learning from you as well. So I really appreciate you taking the time out of your day to come and speak and share your experiences. And I definitely will link when this episode releases. I’ll put a link to your workshop, any other additional information that you’re looking to share. I can’t look forward enough to a future conversation with you outside of this platform. And I’m sure as we have those conversations, I’m going to be like, I didn’t know that. Come on back.

Jessica: It’s amazing what you learn when you get to know people. It’s been lots of fun talking with you. I appreciate the opportunity as well. It’s not often that I get to tell the story of my circuitous and what I think is sometimes a little different journey through my career. I like to call it a diversified career portfolio. (laughter)

Manuel: And with that, everyone, thank you so much for taking the time to watch or listen, whichever platform you have found this through. And if you have any feedback, definitely again, I’m always open to learning and improving. I really want to make this of extreme value to everyone that takes time out of their day to kind of listen and watch. And with that, please continue to plug in and download the knowledge. And until next time, thank you.