My Why

Episode Transcript

Okay, so let me share my journey into why I started Let’s Talk About Skills, Baby. So back when I went to college, I went traditional graduate from high school directly into college. But I didn’t look like the rest of the people that went to school with me because I was working through my way through school, I had to pay my way through school. So, I always had about four or five part time jobs. And what I realized a few years into a biology degree that my father signed me up for because he wanted me to be a dentist and take over his dental practice, was that that’s not what I wanted to do at all. But I had literally no information whatsoever on how to make that change. There. At the time, everything was still newspaper based. Actually, there was monster, but it was really, really new. And it was still basically like AOL dial up. So, when I really wanted to find out information, I had to look through the newspaper, make calls to like potential employers, I didn’t know what kind of jobs were available. We had a career services department, but it was still the binder with like the index cards, that’s all there was, you never really know if they were up to date or not. So, it was just like straight up manual research to try to figure out if I make a change, will there be a job for me at the end of this and it…maybe not a lot of people think about that when they’re 19 years old. But, because financially it was going to make such a huge impact to me, I was in so much debt already trying to complete this bachelor’s degree, for me to make a change, which was almost basically a semester before I graduated, meant that I could go into how many more years of debt that I couldn’t pay off if I had no job to make money.

So, when I finally did make the change, and graduate, I started looking for full time jobs, of course, and the first job that I was offered, actually, I think there were three of them, they all were $28,000 a year. And I couldn’t afford to not take that job. Even though I was actually making more money at my part time jobs. But I was sort of figuring out, I’m going to live the dream, and this is sort of what society expected for you was to go and take a full-time job, it just meant that I had to move back home. Now I was working with adults in these part time jobs. So, one of my friends who was about, I want to say she was seven years older than me, at the time that I was going through this job hunt trying to find this job, her husband actually got a job offer at Nucor Steel. And this was a clean manufacturing plant that was about 30 minutes north of where we lived. And he had no college degree. Now not that that was a bad thing. I just had never seen this happen before. He was getting a job offer for $80,000 versus my $28,000. After I just had so much debt up to my eyeballs that I was like this, wait, what? He was going to take a six-week certificate on the job. And then that was it, they were going to pay him to go through that certificate, and he was going to, you know, go into work.

Now, the interesting thing about this is that at my, you know, my family dinner table, granted, we probably didn’t have dinner together all that much. But, at my family dinner table there were basically three choices in life for career. It was dentist because my dad wanted me to take over the dental practice, as I mentioned. It was doctor, that was also an acceptable option or lawyer. There was really no other discussion about other alternatives, you were going to get a bachelor’s degree or more, and you are going to go into a standardly acceptable field that you could financially be successful. If you weren’t happy, it did not matter by the way. That was it. So fast forward a few years, my salary probably went up. I was still probably under $50,000. And this person, I’m still friends with them to this day, he was already over six figures. And I just could not understand this. Now at the time, I had no idea that this was a passion for me. I was just seeing that, for me, it was a huge struggle. It was so difficult. I was making this huge life decision that impacted me in so many ways with no information. I was seeing all of my friends also moved back home having needed to make similar decisions. And it was so frustrating. And I just remember this frustration. Of course, I just had to take that job in a cubicle because I needed the income and there’s nothing about it.

But then a few years later, I took a job. I had this dream to work in New York City. I took a job at a staffing firm, and I got to see the actual inside of what happens in the hiring process. And that was really eye opening too because it was almost the flip side of what I was seeing as a student In school. I was now seeing that these companies didn’t know what they wanted. They just knew that that person had to have a bachelor’s degree or above. And these were major financial institutions. Bachelor’s degree or above, they didn’t know much about skills or talk about skills. But what was actually happening in the hiring process, like that was the system that was the process, what was actually happening was that I was manually finding people to fit these roles that had the correct skill set, even though the employer didn’t know how to articulate that. I would figure that out from just my relationship with, you know, the hiring manager and go and find those people. And so, when I saw this, and then I sort of compared it to what I experienced as a young person, and I was still in that journey of making huge life decisions, every job that I took, again, very little information. I just was like, man, the system is broken. That was what was so frustrating to me.

And that’s when I got a call for a job offer with a startup. And that startup is what kind of got me into this skills work. To be honest. It was the first really labor market analytics firm. And, we at the time, I mean, this sounds crazy, but now most people can understand this. Especially with COVID, and this recession that we’re in right now, this was in the last recession. So, we went into a financial crisis in about 2008, I want to say, which led to a recession, not the size of what we’re in now. But at the time, I was working for this company, and their client was the state of New Jersey’s Department of Labor. And there were tons of people that were on unemployment that couldn’t find jobs. And the answer was skills. And so, I got to actually start to see how that could be used. But again, here was the issue, technology and data did not support it whatsoever.

And so that sort of led me into this journey of trying to figure out how can we find ways to make that happen? How can we update the data? How can we use the resources that people were scared to use at the time? But all of this talk, in all honesty was all about career. No one ever talked about? Are you happy in life? And I’m going to tell you, what was happening in my professional life and what was happening in my personal life, were two totally different stories. From the outside. Everyone probably thought everything was fine. But on the inside, I was really struggling. I was so unhappy. I had two children, and then when I had my third child it was so, just life was overwhelming. No one really, you know, again, you go to formal education. No one ever really gives you the, the basics on how to be a working mother, and how to handle all of the things. And it was just weighing down on me.

And actually, about five years ago, I just ran myself into complete burnout, depression, anxiety was so high. I quit my job. And I really honestly quit my job. Without anything in place. I just thought if we even go bankrupt, I don’t care because I was so unhappy. And when that all happened, and I came home, and I thought, let me just focus on being a mom for now and not worry about work, even though financially, it was extremely stressful. I realized I had been traveling and working. I had been working 80 hours a week, traveling three days a week, every week, with children, okay, and my third was just about one year old. I was just going through the motions of everyday. I didn’t really know what was going on at home. And what I came to find out was that my five, my middle daughter, who was five at the time was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD and anxiety, and there were no supports for her at school. And so, I had to start advocating for her, while I was also struggling myself with trying to figure out, you know, who I was and what would make me happy. And in doing that, at first, I focused on all the things that were societally acceptable and what I had always done my life. I was focused on her grades; I was focused on making sure that she was still progressing. But two years into this process, she was still crying to go to school every day. And to be honest, I was crying every day. So, I was like, man, is this just how life is, it’s just unhappy? Are you never going to be happy? I had been focusing all these years on trying to help people make better decisions in their life but, this unhappiness was just, it was just weighing down and I can only imagine how this must have been for so many other people. And so I stopped. I just completely stopped focusing on what just the I think in the world we thought was going to be acceptable. I said, I’m not going to look at your grades. I don’t care about any of those things. I’m not going to focus on finances and work and all of that, I’m just going to focus on you being happy every day and how to find that out. And that was I just started reading self-help books. I started going to therapy. I got her a therapist. And what I realized was there was something called growth mindset. Now, this is so funny because, anyone who’s known me for all these years probably thinks of me as this super positive person. But I had no idea what growth mindset was, I really didn’t I promise. And when I learned about it, it was just amazing to me.

There were actually what I call life skills, which is just these, extremely important skills that help you be happy, which leads to success in both your professional and personal life. And the funny thing was, because of the work that I’ve done all these years, I knew that employers, those were the skills that were hardest to find, and they wanted them so bad. And in any industry, and in any job, and in any level. If you could have all of the basics and understand how to regulate yourself and make yourself happy and have resilience, then there was so much you could do in your life. But we were stuck in this box, it was so frustrating. And so, this podcast was because I just wanted to bring these two things together. I knew that the conversations did not need to be separate anymore, they needed to come together because we couldn’t help people navigate without them having the strength to understand and figure out what would make them happy before they could make that navigation happen.

And so, you know, when COVID hit, the interesting thing was I started to see people being sad again. That made me sad, because I knew how that felt. And I wanted to start putting this message out there to let them know that, you know, just because you think from the outside world, that you’re not successful or happy in life, like there is a way around that. You don’t only have to focus on education, you don’t only have to focus on work and moving up the ladder. There’s so much more to that. And I felt like this conversation really brought a lot to the table. And I think now we all learned that our professional and personal lives were no longer separate. COVID has really shown us that they are together and we should have this conversation together.