The best work is on the B-side
The best work is on the B-side
Jennifer Beech on pivoting from literature to instructional design
I’m back with another success story from the humanities!
Jennifer Beech is an instructional designer and technical writer with a Ph.D. in African-American Literature from the University of Memphis and an M.A. in creative writing from Iowa State University. She is also the founder and owner of B-Side Learning, a company specializing in instructional content strategy and design for small and medium-sized businesses, nonprofit organizations, and other learning and development professionals.
I spoke with Jennifer about the difference between teaching and training, why she chose entrepreneurship over a staff role, and how she hopes to support other recovering academics with her new book, Questions and Answers for Humanities Professors Looking To Leave Academia.
Joshua Doležal: I'm curious how you found your way into graduate school to begin with. Was this something you were encouraged to do by others to just fall into it? How did that happen?
Jennifer Beech: I guess I would say I knew I always wanted to be a teacher. I remember coming home from my kindergarten class and I told my mother, I'm gonna be a teacher, like my kindergarten teacher, because I loved her so much.
And of course as I went through school, every grade I was in, I wanted to teach. And then I guess it finally stopped in college when I got to college. And I entertained the idea. It was in the back of my head. I was an English major. I started out in creative writing and after undergrad I really wanted to just focus on writing.
And so I was like, well, let's do a master's degree. So I guess it was my way of putting myself in a cocoon, because I could just get up and write every day, which was really nice. And then after the master's I was a little adrift, wondering if I wanted to do the PhD or if I wanted to work.
And I actually left and got a job, started working. This was 2007. I remember starting that job in July. And then towards the end of the year thinking, I've got some vacation time. I wonder if I should go talk to some people about exploring this PhD thing. Towards the end of 2007 was what was termed the economic slowdown. And my company was downsizing and I was one of the people that got laid off. So I spent the first couple months of 2008 looking at these really dismal job numbers. I mean, which is nothing to what it is now, but feeling really discouraged. And I thought, well, I guess this is the time to go to school. So I applied, got rejected twice. Went and talked to the graduate coordinator and they were like, we can override that and let you in.
I worked full-time in undergraduate admissions while I was going to school. And worked there for nine years. Graduated in eight years. It took much longer than I ever thought it would. But I guess that's what happens when you work. And of course I was looking for another job, wanted to get out of admissions.
I was adjuncting too at the time, trying to get that much needed teaching experience to put on the CV. And as I was looking at jobs, I kept running across this job called instructional designer. And the more that I read about it, I was like, well I do some of that stuff.
And that was probably towards the end of my program, like 2015, 2016.
Joshua Doležal: This is all at the University of Memphis, right?
Jennifer Beech: Yeah.
Joshua Doležal: It sounds like the story you're telling challenges one of my preconceptions, which is that graduate school is like bootcamp, it tears down your identity and rebuilds it in a different image. People talk a lot about how graduate school socializes us in unhealthy ways, but it sounds like you had your foot in the working world the whole time. And so I wonder if you were sucked into that quite as much as someone who did nothing but research and do a teaching assistantship. Did you feel like you were able to stay yourself and not be remade in the mold of a Research-1 professor?
Jennifer Beech: I mean, maybe, but it definitely does socialize you. I feel like by the end of my coursework, we had all learned to speak about our expertise or our budding expertise. And there were so many points in some of my late classes where a question would be asked and people were like, oh, that's outside my area. It was like this refusal to answer. Many people try to, while forming that identity, try to say, okay, well I'm the 19th century Victorian scholar, I'm the Romanticist and so that's what I talk about, you know? And I don't talk about anything else. I feel like that was something that I picked up.
There are some ways even today where I feel like I'm probably more of a perfectionist than some of my work colleagues, and I have to catch myself and think, okay, it's a good enough solution. Just go with it, you know? Where I think maybe most people never even think about the perfect solution, you know?
Joshua Doležal: Well, that's one of those tropes that people mention, is that you're never done, it's never enough in academe. You publish something, and you think “what next?” and get started on the next thing. It’s the weekend, but if you take time off to be with your family, you're somehow slacking. So you feel like that's something that you internalized a little bit?
Jennifer Beech: I think I did a little. I published something in a journal, and I thought, oh, this is this great achievement, right? You're supposed to get publications. And then turns out oh, but it's a lower rate journal. It doesn't count for as much as you think it does. I probably had a few more publications than most of my colleagues because I wasn't teaching for as long as they were. But then come to find out once you hit the market, it's like, oh, but those aren't really great journals to be published in. You've got to shoot for the higher rate journals, which are really hard to get into as a graduate student. So I would say, yeah, that sense of being deferred, where it's like, okay, you achieved this, but so what? There's always something else. Sometimes that feeds into me even now where it can be hard to celebrate achievements.
Joshua Doležal: I certainly identify with that. You had quite a while, I guess, in your PhD program to think about things and you said you stumbled into instructional design. But if I was reading your LinkedIn profile correctly, you actually got a certificate in that as part of your PhD. Is that true?
Jennifer Beech: No, it was actually afterwards. And I was doing so much Googling and reading of this and that and then I realized my school has a certificate in this. My thinking was, I could certainly learn all this on my own, but am I really going be dedicated to it? I didn't really have a mentor or anyone who could guide me. I thought, well how am I gonna know when I've learned enough? How do I know I'm learning the right things? I can't do another like full degree. But a certificate is four classes. And I thought that might be a great way for me to learn a lot quicker than me trying to learn it on my own. And also having someone who can assess my knowledge. Someone who can say, okay, you're learning the right skills that you need to learn. I was still working at the university, so I mean, there was no cost involved.
I would say it was a great decision. I learned a lot. I actually got my hands on a lot of the software which I think was important because I had read how a lot of people didn't get to do that in their programs and then they're stuck trying to learn that at some point. And I actually left with a portfolio piece or two, which was really nice.
Joshua Doležal: For somebody who's maybe seen the title but has no idea what it is all about, could you give a layperson's definition of instructional design?
Jennifer Beech: I would just say it's the practice of designing and building learning materials and experiences. I tell people that I design training programs because it's basically what I do, but you don't have to be limited to just training. Any of the formal or even informal ways that people learn.
Joshua Doležal: So it could be a business context or it could be a university program,
Jennifer Beech: It could be like a formal course, it could be a Slack group, it could be a podcast, it could be just all the different ways that, that people learn and gather information.
Joshua Doležal: So anyone who's wanted to be a teacher has had teacherly instincts, and has probably done instructional design without knowing it. You’re making me remember these terrible trainings I sat through with the government. So I was a wildland firefighter with US Forest Service in Montana for seven summers. And I transitioned later to wilderness trails work, which was much more fun. But in firefighting, we had what was called Guard School, where you get your certificate. And every June when we started, we'd have at least a week or two of trainings. Somebody in Washington DC would make a PowerPoint and then shotgun it out to all the different district offices. And somebody would be reading it to us who hadn't designed the presentation. Death by PowerPoint. And we'd all fall asleep.
We had this really funny moment once where one of my coworkers started moaning in his sleep and everybody thought he was having a heart attack. And all we remembered of the training was that.
I was in undergrad and then in a master's program, coming home every summer and going through the same damn thing. And I thought you're not going to remember anything you're learning unless there's a story attached to it. And we kept getting drilled in these Watch Out situations and these safety heuristics like the 10 Standard Fire Orders, but they weren't tied to any real experiences that we'd had.
So I was thinking about those books that I grew up with as a kid, the Choose Your Own Adventure books. You come to a page and you have to make a choice. And it could be the choice that makes your rollercoaster fly off the rail, or it could be the right choice. And I was thinking firefighters should have this choose-your-own-adventure training manual where you come to a critical decision. And maybe you get burned over if you make the wrong decision or something, you know? Anyway, that would be an artifact of instructional design, right?
Jennifer Beech: I know. It seems like that would be like the easiest training to put a story in, because you have so many real life stories that I'm sure all of you can tell, you know? Yeah, they missed an opportunity there.
Joshua Doležal: Well, it's so bureaucratic in government that I don't know what pay grade you'd have to be at to actually produce the training materials. But it certainly was not at my level!
Well, so you had an internship, it looks like first in instructional design, and then you moved into this role where you did contract work for a consulting firm. Could you talk about those two positions?
Jennifer Beech: Yeah, as I was learning about instructional design, I had some gaps that I had to fill. And one of the things I know Joe [Stubenrauch] talks about a lot, creating your own portfolio and doing your own work -- that's great and I got a lot of work that way. But the downside is you do it alone, right? And instructional design is very collaborative as a lot of fields are. And so I was missing the collaborative piece and I thought, I wonder if I could find some other people who also want to do this. That way I can work with a group and then when I'm in an interview I can talk about what it's like to work in a group and what role I take and how you work with a team and all that.
And so it appealed to me to see or learn more about the whole process. When you do your own project, you can make them however you want. And of course your budget is always unlimited and everyone always turns everything in on time, right? So the internship helped me really get some more real world context and what it's like to get ahold of the subject matter expert and what to do when they don't respond to your emails and what to do when they don't want to answer your questions or how to format your questions for that work.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Were you able to network as part of that? Is that how you found your way to Standpoint Consulting? Or did you see an ad and send in an application?
Jennifer Beech: I did do some networking. I got the position at Standpoint through another networking connection through ATD, which is the Association for Talent Development, one of the professional organizations that incorporates instructional design. And it was someone through that group who was like, Hey, I have a friend that's looking for an instructional design job, send me your resume. And I remember sending it and not hearing anything for weeks and I thought, oh no, they've moved on. I guess I just wasn't qualified. And then out of the blue, three or four weeks later, they said, Hey, you want to have this conversation? It was October and they were like, we're getting finalized with the contract and everything. And then there was weeks and weeks again, and I thought, oh no, it fell through. I didn't sign that contract until about the week before Christmas. And I thought, okay, now I'm officially an instructional designer! It took a while.
Joshua Doležal: Well, tell me if you can pick a project that you did for a Standpoint. So you did sign on with them, but it seems like you were still in more of a freelance type role?
Jennifer Beech: I was, yeah. That contract was working with a nonprofit who wanted to do a course for college students who may have experienced their first run-in with racism on a college campus. And maybe it being the first incident that they really remember fully. And just responding to the shell shock that sometimes that can produce. My PhD work was in African American literature. I taught it for five years. And so once I heard about the project, I was like, yes, this needs to exist. I want to do it. I don't care if it's contract or not, this class is going to happen. I was looking for full-time work, but that's what I got and I thought, yeah, I definitely need to work on this course.
Joshua Doležal: So that was the bulk of your partnership with Standpoint, was that course. How long was this course?
Jennifer Beech: It was designed to be a half hour seat time like an asynchronous e-learning course. But they had some interactions in it. There was some video. We presented a lot of research into how racism functions in various parts of society. How it functions in education and healthcare and socioeconomic factors. Some terminology that students could use to describe their experience. And this nonprofit also did a lot of other programming around emotional emancipation. They actually ran various cohorts on just community-based talking through racism, how you partner with community leaders and so letting them know the other resources that they had at their disposal. So it was a really great experience.
Joshua Doležal: Great! So it sounds like you didn't leave the company—it was just one project, and then when that project was over, you moved onto something else.
Jennifer Beech: When I took it, I actually still worked in higher ed. I was actually doing them both because I thought, well, I don't know how long this is going to last. And then the course ended up making me busier than the work in higher ed. And so I eventually did leave higher ed for good and just started doing contracts.
Joshua Doležal: Well, you've decided to become an entrepreneur and launch your own instructional and design firm. Why did you choose that as opposed to trying to find a full-time role at a company somewhere?
Jennifer Beech: I grew to really like the flexibility of being able to contract. Having a partner who has a stable income also helps. And I don't think there's another point in life where I would be able to do this. And so I was like, why not do it now? And I was getting more contract opportunities than I was full-time. And I think that just had to do with coming out of the pandemic. A lot of companies weren't hiring a lot of full-time roles. But obviously the work still had to be done. And after about, I don't remember, the fifth or sixth contract, I was like, okay, well you might want to start protecting yourself, removing some of the liability from yourself and getting an LLC and getting a business bank account and filling out the website a little bit more. I also picked up technical writing. I've just tried to branch out into some other parts of writing that I can do.
Joshua Doležal: What's the story behind the name of your company? B-Side Learning. I assume there's a personal story there.
Jennifer Beech: I went through a couple of names before I decided on it because a lot of people would say, well, just use your name. I would ask around, like, what do you do? And they were like, just use your name, it's cool, because you don't have a hard name to spell or anything like that. And so for a while that's what I did. And then I was just like, I don't know, it just feels very generic. It doesn't really feel like me, but I'll go with it for now. And the more that I thought about what I think of learning, I see learning as the process of uncovering what was hidden. And I started looking into, okay, what are things that mean beneath or hidden? I started looking at like back pages and the B side. And I was like, do people even still do B sides? What if someone doesn't even know what that is? Turns out they do. And and what's cool about the B side is it's the side that has not only just the extra songs that don't fit on the record, but also the more experimental work, sometimes some of the better songs. But that an artist may be a little hesitant to release thinking that they may not be as popular.
A lot times the B side of records are the best.
Joshua Doležal: More raw and authentic.
Jennifer Beech: Yeah. And people would look at my website and they would go, oh, it's so great. It's so simple. It's just easy to use. And the more that I thought about my brand and who I was, I thought, I'm just a simple person. And people seem to appreciate that. And when I started trying to design the logo I kept coming across these records and CDs and things that were circular. And the first iteration of the logo, I thought, this looks like a mix tape. Like you put this on a mix tape that you just recorded some stuff off the radio. And so B-side also started to mean like this throwback vibe. Old school. And I was like, I'm liking this. So it stuck.
Joshua Doležal: That's super fun. I love that autonomy and the creative freedom to design it yourself and make it really in tune with who you are. Can you tell me about your most recent project or something you're working on now, what problems you were trying to solve and how you did that?
Jennifer Beech: My most recent project that I finished was creating a knowledge base for a healthcare analytics company. They actually had a platform that they licensed out to some local governments, some nonprofits where people could research Medicare fraud. And so they were acquiring a new customer and they didn't have any support material for the software. So the VP would do a recorded Zoom session and walk the customer through. But they wanted something where people could ask questions, and where people could go back and refer to it as they needed. And so this customer was pushing them to do a knowledge base, so they could have some articles online that people could refer to. And they had not done it, so they didn't have any of this material. So we were writing on basically how to interact with the software, how to use it to investigate certain doctors, if you sense that there's some fraud going on. And that was a really cool project.
Joshua Doležal: What are tools that you use? Are you working with mainly with Articulate Storyline, or what are some of the other tools?
Jennifer Beech: Actually with that contract, I worked with Madcap Flare, which was a first for me. And that tool actually does do some e-learning too. But I haven't explored it enough to know exactly how well it does in that area.
Joshua Doležal: Did your client provide you with access to that? Or are you having to buy all these licenses for software yourself?
Jennifer Beech: They actually had a copy of it. What was nice is they had decided previously that they were going to use Madcap Flare, but they knew about as much about it as I did. So we were all learning at the same time. Which I think was helpful because I know a lot of times the software and technology could be a hurdle for a lot of people. It was a hurdle for me too. So being able to find a contract where there's not a lot of required knowledge or you don't necessarily have to be an expert in it is really helpful.
I actually haven't really used a lot of Storyline. I've actually designed more in PowerPoint. And I think it's because with the novel nonprofits, I tend to go that route because I know their budgets are limited and it's much easier for them to keep up to date.
Joshua Doležal: All of this talk is making me think about the pandemic and it sounds like you were not teaching then, is that right?
Jennifer Beech: Right.
Joshua Doležal: So you didn't have to deal with the remote challenges and all of that. I made some discoveries during that one semester I had to teach remotely that I think would carry over into instructional design, because a lot of people were doing one size fits all things like recording PowerPoint lectures with the video and the slides and doing something that was fairly uniform. And I guess I'm just never satisfied if I know something's not landing with my students. So I did some stuff like that, a Zoom with screen share, and went through a few lessons. But I realized that the smallest group that I had, which was an American Lit survey, there were only seven students enrolled and they were all majors. And you would've thought that that was the group that would want to be synchronous on Zoom have an actual discussion because seven is manageable.
But in English we’re all hermits and introverts and nobody wanted to be seen. They wanted to have their video off. And I tried a couple of discussions like that and it didn't work. So I actually experimented with something that was perfect for that group – I would have seven or eight discussion prompts, load them into a Google document, set it to share with all the students, give them edit access, ask them to do it synchronously. We would all join the document at the start of class. They would each would pick a font color. Then they would just decide which question they wanted to tackle and in which order. And so there were like seven different conversations happening simultaneously in different colors in this document. I would just jump back and forth to see what people were saying and add my comments. But people who never talked in a large group wrote a ton and the people who usually dominated discussions, I don't know -- maybe they couldn't type very fast. So it was a whole different power dynamic. And then there was an artifact when we were done that they could download and refer to later.
But the larger group that had 20 students, they were all non-majors. This was a memoir writing class. It was much more unwieldy to try to have a large group discussion with them, but they were much more extroverted. They were business majors, athletic training majors, and so they wanted that. So we did the Zoom and the breakout rooms. I really found that I had to customize.
This is a long way of coming around to a question I've had about instructional design and perhaps an unfair prejudice of mine that's prevented me from really exploring that path for myself, which is that it's linear. Like you were saying, one of the contracts you developed was PowerPoint driven, it's something you click through. There aren't so many moments where you can stop and argue with the premise or have a discussion or a debate. It's like the mandatory trainings that sometimes organizations do where there's a right answer and you can't argue with it, and you just have to accept it. Is that true of a lot of instructional design or am I making that up?
Jennifer Beech: I would say it can be common. And I think some of that is due to types of training that you have. Because a lot of compliance type training is going to be like that. Where it is very much, here's the answer. You get a little quiz maybe and you have to select the right answer. I remember a lot of people talking about exactly what you were describing, that linear module type model that a lot of courses have. And wanting to get away from the linearity of it.
You could argue that an area like learning experience design tries to do that. Where it's more about creating an atmosphere for people to learn and not so much a product in and of itself, like, here, I'm going to hand you this PowerPoint or this completed website or whatever the product is, where it may be more of incorporating social learning. Maybe you interact with the facilitator or the instructor. Maybe the participants are creating their own base of knowledge like you were doing with that Google Doc, where everyone creates their own study guide or job guide or something, and everyone can make it individualized for what they're doing. There is a lot of room in instructional design to do a lot of that. I think there should be. I mean, just based on how people learn, the least effective way is to sit someone in front of the click through screen.
Some of that has to do with company expectations. I would say that is a lot to balance when you have leadership or higher up who are like, oh, we want it like this, and you're like, yeah, but that's really boring.
Joshua Doležal: Jennifer, this is my problem. I have to be honest, I'm struggling with this as part of my transition to industry. Because the corporate environment is just so foreign to what good teaching is, as I have experienced it and practiced it. This might seem really abstract, but I would always use this quote from the Puritan minister Jonathan Edwards, who said there's a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet and having a sense of its sweetness. Somebody can tell you that honey is sweet. You can read about it, you can click through the PowerPoint about how sweet honey is, but you’ve got to taste the honey to know it, right? That's how you own that knowledge.
And so there are all these parts of the learning process, like I would teach first-year students and they often would be offended by certain ideas. They would be angry or resistant. But that's part of the grieving process. Part of the five stages of grief – anger and denial are right up there at the front. So if you're changing something about your value system, you're losing something, right? You're leaving it. And that's not a failure of teaching or a failure of learning. It's actually the beginning that ends hopefully in acceptance or ownership or something like that. But it's an emotional process.
This is where I feel like in corporate training, you just can't be a human being. Is there room for delight? Is there room for anger and denial and bargaining, even depression as part of your learning process? Or do you just need to impersonally click the right answer? I don't know if I have a solution to that, but when you're teaching at a private school with a small class, it's just such a different model from a corporate environment. Do you think I'll ever solve that problem or am I destined to be discontented with business?
Jennifer Beech: No, I think you could definitely solve it. I think you would probably have to pick where you want to solve it because I feel like industries that are a little bit more progressive or a little bit more forward thinking would probably be more open to it. I think not looking at more conservative industries, like law or finance or something like that, even medicine, healthcare, where it's definitely going to be very compliance based because they're heavily regulated. But if you can get into a smaller place, where leadership is a little more forward thinking and a little more progressive…
I've actually been impressed by some companies. They'll have diversity statements on their website and things in their ad like please apply. Well, you know women and people of color are traditionally not applying, so we welcome you to apply. You know? And people who are actually thinking through some of those issues would probably be a lot more open to it. And if there's somewhere that will have the budget, that will let you do it who can actually recognize that, hey, this could be a great recruiting and retention tool if we have employees who feel like they have opportunities to grow.
Joshua Doležal: Let me give you a specific case and see if this would illustrate the point. I do want to ask about your book before we're done. So you studied African American literature for a lot of years. My theory is that literature is so much more effective as a teaching tool for diversity and inclusion than training because when we read a story and we immerse ourselves in it, it actually happens to us. The same parts of our brain are activated as if we lived through it ourselves. So whether I’m a person of color or not, reading Toni Morrison is going to change the shape of my brain. It's really going to imprint on me in a personal way.
If you take a case like the Starbucks fiasco, some years back in Philadelphia, where the company made a gesture of closing their stores and forcing everyone to go to diversity training for a day. If they were to have a more sustained discussion of Song of Solomon or something, I think it would be more effective because the visceral, which is part of the cognitive process, the emotional response shapes your thinking and your understanding. The ability to discuss within a spectrum of opinion or the ability to work through some of those stages of angry denial, whatever, until you get to acceptance, that would be more effective than sitting in a room where someone tells you how you ought to think. I don't know if you agree with that?
Jennifer Beech: Definitely agree. I think I find, particularly with DEI issues, attitudes are the hardest thing to change. Because who changes their attitude based on a day long or hour long training? I find that most solutions are training or training plus solutions. It's usually training and something else. When it comes to issues of diversity and inclusion, it's training and focus groups, or it's training and the certain cultural shifts that have to happen in an organization. Because, yeah, I remember that incident and I was like, no one's really looking at what's incentivizing that culture because that wasn't the first time it happened. Someone's getting rewarded for it. We’ve got to change that reward system that allows people to do that. And a lot of times that's much more than just training somebody. You can do it through literature. You don't have to necessarily meet that person in real life. You don't want to bring in, like, here's a person of color, like they're on display. But I'm glad you mentioned Song of Solomon, because I think that is one of Toni Morrison's best books, but does not get the attention that it should.
Joshua Doležal: Please set me straight if I'm getting this wrong, but the way Starbucks interpreted that instance was interactions with people of color are a PR problem, and we're going to fix it with training. Or if you're the manager in that store, you're going to handle this PR liability problem differently. Whereas if you read literature and you immerse yourself in that world, it becomes part of your own value system. It's not a problem that you're managing. It's an expression of belief, ethics that you've internalized. And I think that takes time. Maybe that's not easily aligned with a corporate model. It's also personal and subjective, right? You can't predict outcomes very well. But it's really the secret of change. It's the secret of authenticity. The humanity part of it is the secret sauce. It's what everybody's looking for with their user experience research. I feel like there's an intractable puzzle there in terms of resources and reality and where humanity bridges that gap.
Jennifer Beech: You're pointing out the biggest differences between teaching and training. And I feel like that incident really defined it for me a lot. I was still in the academy at the time, and I know there were a lot of professors online who were making the diversity syllabus, right? So they're like, go read White Fragility, go read some James Baldwin, go read whatever the texts were. And I remember thinking along the lines of, well, throwing a bunch of books at people isn't going to make them change. Not without any other context, without any discussion, without any debate or anything. But just saying, here, go read this and then you're going to be a better human being. It is not helpful at all because a lot of us know things we're supposed to do, but we don't do them, right? We know smoking is bad, but how many people smoke, you know? Changing hearts and minds is tough work and it takes a lot of patience. It takes time because people will disagree with you and people will fight you about it, and that's fine. That's the process like you've said.
Joshua Doležal: Well, it takes relationships and relationships over time, but speaking of not throwing books at people, you have a book coming out through Amazon, Questions and Answers for Humanities Professors Looking To Leave Academia. There's a lot of literature out there on this. What does your book add to all the other literature?
Jennifer Beech: I definitely thought, I’ve got to speak to my humanities folks because I was in English. English, History, Philosophy, those programs were very close in their requirements and things. And I thought there's not really a whole lot out there for humanities because our challenge is, the way English majors are sold, oh, you get this great set of skills that's malleable for any profession. Which is very true, but no one teaches you how to market any of that. So that you have to figure out.
And so I thought, well, our challenge is a little bit different than perhaps some in the social sciences and the other hard sciences, where you have this definitive skillset. So for them it's like, go learn soft skills. And I'm like, man, we have all the soft skills. We have monopolies on soft skills. For us usually the question is, even though I would get this question when teaching, should I minor in something else that's more practical?
I would have people reach out to me, and after a while I thought I should probably break down my answers to a couple these questions because first of all, I just want to make sure I'm being consistent. But then someone can have access to me anytime they want to without necessarily having to contact me.
I do have to give a shout out to Eric Stephens, because he was the first person I saw on LinkedIn talking about this. And I was like, I didn't even know anybody cared about my story. I'm sure there were other people before him, but he was the first person to be like, industries should look at people coming from an education setting and recognize the skills that they're bringing.
Joshua Doležal: Yeah. Is there one example of how someone from the humanities can market themselves that has worked for you or people you know?
Jennifer Beech: The big answer everyone would give networking. Definitely. Building those relationships takes time. It takes sharing, it takes some degree of vulnerability, right? That has to be matched over time, to the point that now, you have a relationship with someone and just all of a sudden it can pay off. It's definitely the long game, but it is definitely the smartest strategy.
Joshua Doležal: Well, I'm so glad that you're part of my network. I've appreciated your contributions to my early toddler attempts at this career transition, so hopefully I can pay that back eventually.
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