A Career In Three Acts
It’s sometimes astonishing how often the universe sends you signs along your journey. I was delighted to read an excerpt from Joanne Lipman’s new book NEXT! In the WSJ: You’re Already Moving Toward Your Next Career. This article comes just as I’m winding down my role at Path Forward to embark on figuring out what my next adventure might be.
The excerpt – which is well worth a read and suggests the book is worth a read as well – portrays three professionals who made somewhat unexpected pivots that happened through a series of serendipitous choices that led to a new career.
This made me think about the twists and turns I’ve taken in my career. I’ve come to see my career – so far – as having three distinct Acts.
Act I: Old and New Media
Immediately post-college I spent time in book publishing, in various editorial roles. Media has always been a tough business – more so now, but not exactly easy in the early 90s during a time of economic uncertainty. After nearly 7 years I found I wasn’t making much traction and took a few classes in HTML and web design. It was early days for the internet and many tech companies were hiring like crazy out of adjacent industries. This led me to iVillage – the internet for women! It was the perfect pivot because it took my existing skills in media and stretched me into new media. I left iVillage after a few years to join News America Marketing, then a division of News Corporation. If you’ve watched Succession you can imagine NAM as the very, very boring but profitable business that no one talks about or cares about because it’s not very interesting. Their main business was selling coupon inserts in Sunday newspapers. I was brought into the “i” division (the “i” was for interactive) to expand their online offerings. It didn’t last long for me – I was laid off after less than a year.
Act II: Tech Marketing
January of 2003 was not a great time to be looking for a job in media, old or new. I found myself trying to figure out which direction to move in. On a whim I applied for a freelance gig writing email newsletters (the past truly is prologue). Through a strange set of circumstances it led me to actually being hired by a marketing technology provider called Return Path. They sold email marketing optimization services to large consumer marketers (think companies like Williams-Sonoma, REI, etc.) and they hired me to work with major clients on improving their email content strategy. It was a natural extension from my work creating email content on the media side to advising retailers and other large-volume marketers how to better communicate through email.
After a few years in that job I was ready to try my hand at something new, but unlike previous transitions I wasn’t looking to leave the company, I just wanted a new role. Conversations with our CEO and other leaders led to a job in the marketing department. It evolved a bit over the course of about 8 years, with increasing levels of responsibility and team size, but always included an emphasis on content and communication. And lots of time on media relations. Once again I had managed to evolve – taking what I’d learned in media and client service and building on it.
Act III: Nonprofit Workforce Development
After more than 12 years at Return Path I was ready for new challenges. This time I was thinking about opportunities both inside and outside the company. The answer ended up being a weird mix of both.
Return Path’s HR department had been working to diversify the company, especially with regard to gender and especially in technical roles. They worked with experts at the National Center for Women in Information Technology, a think tank, to address issues that might be keeping the company from attracting, retaining and promoting women. The leader of the HR department noticed one glaring problem – friends she knew personally who weren’t able to get back into the workforce because they’d left to take care of their kids. That led to the launch of a “returnship” – the CEO wrote about it here.
Eventually other companies started asking the leaders at Return Path for advice on how to start their own return to work programs. Matt Blumberg, the CEO, decided to found a nonprofit to work with employers to create these programs. And when he shared this idea with me I suddenly knew what my next career move was going to be. I stepped down as the VP of corporate marketing at Return Path to become the executive director of the then-unnamed Path Forward. For the first few years we were incubated at Return Path – using their offices, sharing other office services – until they were acquired by another company in 2018. This is why I say it was a weird mix of both leaving the company and not leaving.
This move is the one that often seems the least obvious to people who aren’t me. I’d never worked in a nonprofit. I’d never run a business of any kind. But there were a few things I had done over the previous 20 years that provided me the building blocks to this new role:
I’d been completely obsessed with women in the workplace and particularly the issues mothers face in the workforce. In her WSJ essay Lipman mentions “paying attention to your passions.” While cleaning out my home office in 2015, as I was thinking about what my next move might be, I discovered I’d been collecting articles about how women navigate the workforce since the 90s. It was like a giant flashing sign that starting Path Forward was the right next move.
I’d worked with corporate executives in a consulting capacity. I felt confident in my ability to figure out employers challenges and create a program to meet those challenges.
I’d been successful at public relations. What a new nonprofit needs is really good press. I felt certain I knew what to do to generate great headlines. (And we certainly did.)
Lastly, I’d kept two humans alive without an instruction manual. Nothing improved my sense that I could “figure things out” as much as having kids did. I felt sure that whatever I didn’t know about running a nonprofit I could learn as I went.
Choosing My Next Adventure
So what’s next for me? I honestly don’t know. But wow, I found Lipman’s essay inspiring and honestly calming. Not surprisingly I’ve had bouts of anxiety – will anyone hire me again? Will my resume make sense to anyone? The answers are yes, and maybe not, but there’s ways around that.
As I look back on my career across three distinct phases, I notice a few common themes. One is storytelling. Every job has had an element of storytelling – helping others to tell stories (publishing and media), encouraging marketers to use stories alongside sales, telling the stories of a company, empowering caregivers to tell their stories with confidence to employers.
Another theme is resilience. Trying to break into, and stay in, media in NYC was tough and I could have let my failures there completely derail me. But I refused to give up.
And the third theme is exploration. I’m intensely curious about the world and the way it works and each successive cycle of my career has helped me explore some new sector of the economy, giving me a new way of looking at work. And life.
So what does this all mean for me now? Well, to come back to the beginning of this post I suspect that Joanne is right – I’ve probably been moving toward my next career for a while now. But the other element that her essay highlighted was the role of serendipity. Throughout my career I’ve benefited from an ability to see opportunities that maybe don’t seem obvious (“Sure, I can start a nonprofit!”) and then taking a leap.
I’m honestly not sure if my next role will be a continuation of Act III, a return to one of my earlier Acts or something altogether new. I’m going to have a lot of fun figuring it out.