I’m a lot like you. I had jobs I loved and jobs that left me feeling uninspired and unfulfilled. I know what it’s like to want more.
I also know how to get it.
My last position at National Public Radio sounded outwardly like a dream job. I had title, salary, and a sizeable budget. I was working in the nation’s capital in one of the nation’s most prominent and respected news powerhouses.
Yet every day felt like I was walking around in someone else’s shoes, living someone else’s dream life.
There were aspects of my job I absolutely loved. They all had to do with people: recruiting the best talent to NPR, supporting and coaching my team, and opening career pathways for colleagues.
I took careful stock of when I’ve felt fulfilled at work. Over the past 13+ years, I have built an interdisciplinary career spanning strategic communications, business operations, and workforce capacity building. I have worked on Capitol Hill, in several media organizations (including NBC and NPR), and spent six years connecting job seekers to careers in East Africa’s volatile employment market.
I have been in a position to manage teams, hire and develop staff, and read thousands of job applications.
Here’s what that means for you:
Real-world methodology: The training techniques I use in Joy Adjacent are distilled from many years of observing job seekers succeed and fail. My consulting combines self-discovery, resume refinement, cover letter writing, and interview strategy.
Narrative and personal branding: Story is the only vehicle that changes minds. Facts, figures, and lists of accomplishments support existing conclusions, but stories galvanize action. You must craft a compelling professional story if you want to convince an employer to hire you. You’re in luck, because narrative branding is exactly my forte. In fact, my writing on a popular political blog got me recruited into my first job and launched my communications career. I know exactly how to craft a persuasive narrative, I scrutinize every detail, and my attention to style and grammar ensure application materials are professional and polished.
Outcomes focus: My service is about keeping the outcome in sight. I do not want to keep a client longer than necessary just to bill more hours. My goal is to clarify the client’s career goals as expeditiously as possible, develop the roadmap to get there, and keep the client focused on success.
I am also an avid skydiver, climber, and traveler, and I work hard to incorporate the wonder of adventure in everyday life. After earning my coach rating from the United States Parachute Association, I discovered the joy of working individually with people to uncover their skills, dismantle the hidden sources of their fears, and guide them towards a more expansive place of possibility. In the context of career and job search strategy, I push my clients to confront the unknown, embrace the discomfort of self-betterment, and cultivate opportunities to learn and grow.
Employment & Published Writing
Notion: “Introducing change can be surprisingly fraught — especially for companies in their earliest stages. That's because small teams have a higher density of builders versus managers. They’re here to get things done, not get mired in bureaucracy. But ad hoc work doesn’t scale, so at a certain inflection point in every company’s growth trajectory, improvisation and serendipity must make way for predictability and consistency.”
The Guardian: “While the education sector is making strides to rethink a historically inadequate learning model of lectures and rote memorisation, most colleges and universities are still focused on churning out large numbers of graduates that are not qualified for the workplace. Indeed, the expansion of educational access often comes at the expense of quality.”
The New Times: “Our team has a unique advantage: knowing what it is like in the job seeker’s shoes. MindSky operates from a unique vantage point: we understand both the job seeker and the hiring manager, and we know how to bring the two sides together effectively. Our mission from the outset has been to connect employers to pre-screened professionals, simplifying the hiring process and making it easier for talented people to build great careers.”
Disrupt Africa: “We have kept our marketing efforts really limited. It has been mostly organic growth through personal recommendations, in fact, 42 per cent of our users are referred to us by existing MindSky users. That’s a US$0 acquisition cost and we’re thrilled that our users enjoy what we offer and recommend it to their friends.”
Moguldom Nation: “The potential to transform the job-seeking process here is massive. There hasn’t been, to date, a job board that has seen wide adoption among hiring managers in Africa, who are generally not accustomed to digital automation, nor wide success among job seekers.”
MindSky Magazine: A bit of advice to the job seekers who used MindSky, the job search platform I co-founded in East Africa.