I was honored to be invited to speak at Career Day 2009! But, preparing remarks was a tough assignment and I completely neglected to address 75% of the issues speakers were to talk about:

Inevitably, given where I ended up, I decided to talk about change and prepared seven slides to go with it:

My first career was radio and tv production. I followed a plan, got an Associates in mass communications – just one of three women in most of my radio/TV classes. I worked in Boston and Hyannis, MA but found there was a tendency to limit women to traffic (scheduling commercials and psas, logging shows for FCC audits) or copy writing. I thought the writing was fun, but playing with the hardware was what I wanted to do.

None of my career changes was planned. The station I worked for had financial difficulties and laid off staff. I took a job with a Pittsburgh employment agency because they sent me out on a typist’s job at an ad agency that paid less than minimum wage while describing the position as a creative art director. I told them I could do their job at least as well, if not better. They were hiring.

I was there about six months while looking to get back into media. I interviewed at Channel 9 Stubenville and with a computer consulting company in Texas, for a technical recruiting position. Dallas paid more. The computer industry was experiencing rapid growth combined with constant change (sort of the toddler stage – PCs did not exist yet!). I moved from recruiting to logistics (shipping people around the country based on skills), to management, to training manager, to VP level at three different companies between 1976 and 1980. But, I wanted to come home. So I took a job with another consulting firm and opened their Pittsburgh office. When they laid me off in 1983, I was a part time Gateway student at Chatham working on my tutorial. This was the third job I’d lost in 10 years, not a great track record. But, I had a couple of loyal customers who encouraged me when I talked about starting up my own consulting firm – and 25 years later, that company is still in business – introducing a new data warehousing product, a project management methodology and two new supplier diversity services this year. That’s a long way from radio and television production!

Important things I’ve learned along the way:

At junior college, my favorite professor told the class, “You’re all salesmen”. See, times have changed! Today, he’d say sales people. But, when the room protested he explained … we’re all born sales people. As infants, we convince large, quasi-intelligent people to feed us, bring us blankets, play with us and even change some pretty stinky diapers. We may employ different techniques to get what we want now, but we’re selling. In any interview situation, in most business situations we’re selling. Selling why hire me. Selling, why my idea. Selling … always selling.

At Chatham, I had several strong professors. From the three who made up my tutorial board I learned:

Change is inevitable. Prepare a plan. Prepare to be flexible!