Finding a job during a recession is tough enough. When you have no practical experience, it’s even harder. Here’s what I did…
S1E4: Finding My First Gig
Tyler Small: It was 2012 and unfortunately the unemployment rate was up over 8%. And the learning and development industry contracts with the economy. So. Many of the jobs in that space, many of the hiring opportunities freeze when the economy contracts.
[00:00:26] If you may recall, in 2008, the housing crisis everything came tumbling down. And didn't really begin to stabilize until 2011, 2012. When it began to rebuild. And so companies were probably just around that time, starting to , transition into growing again. However, it was still pretty contracted in the learning and development space.
[00:00:53] So I was looking now I was the new kid on the block. I had just graduated with my master's degree. I had applied and applied and applied and nothing was happening. So , some people, I mentioned the last episode, we're saying, Oh, you should go back to school get a different degree. Oh, you should go work at McDonald's. And , I was not feeling that in particular .
[00:01:18] So I turned to networking and I hopped on LinkedIn and started looking for connections of connections and just messaging people. Hey, do you know of any work that I could do for you just graduated, I'm looking for an opportunity, that sort of thing. So luckily, a friend of mine had a connection with Brian Melvin. And Brian Melvin was a super cool guy in the L and D space. Super creative. Had a business background. Really fun to talk to. Really fun guy to know. A real cutting edge type of character . I would say one of his top skills is mentoring and another one is figuring out, what does this client need in order to have a top-notch experience? .
[00:02:07] And so he was in this , perfect environment working on a contract with Bank of America. And super great at mentoring. So I fit that role on the mentee side, right on the protege side. And he got me in the door. And, he got me onto a team there working with a lady named Deborah Woodruff. Super cool lady as well.
[00:02:33] And thus began my professional life. Up Until that time, I had done some smaller gigs. I had been writing academically, teaching university. , but all these projects were not substantial from a corporate perspective. And so this big contract with bank of America was this opportunity for me to work at a project with a big name and to work with some bigger players, to have a lot of mentoring and support and really grow my professional brand , and start working at at that higher level .
[00:03:12] So I worked on this Bank of America contract and it was a great learning experience. We would do the. Here I built this thing. Here it is. Take a look and they would go through it with me and , they would point out like here, this could be better. This could be better.
[00:03:27] You know, watch out for this, like, think about this from our client's perspective, when they read this, they might think this and so on and so forth. So it was this really great cyclical. Iterative approach to design that I really hadn't experienced a lot in school. And they knew what the client expected. It was very controlled environment. I would say in order to , design cool stuff within certain boundaries.
[00:03:57] And that led to other consulting projects. One of them was working with the University of Utah's David Eccles, school of business, which was super cool. They reached out to me to create four blended courses, which is, , I mean, there's a face-to-face component and an online component. And I had the opportunity to help create this new entrepreneurship certificate.
[00:04:23]This was a really cool opportunity because while working for bank of America was great. It just, wasn't super exciting. We're working with. , mortgage processing, new mortgage systems. , you know, , how to coach , your, direct reports through , this new training process . So it was creating these things that were great from a newcomer's perspective and in quickly became , kind of, oh, okay. That was fun. What's the next thing.
[00:04:55] Which was really great for a first step in my postgraduate professional career success. And , they loved me. They'd have me build for. 7,000. People or one of my products went out to 20,000. People at bank America. So it was pretty impressive. The scale of the things I was building and , they loved my work and everything.
[00:05:20]And at the same time I was looking to do a little bit more strategic work. I wanted to be more dynamic and expand my talents. And that's the opportunity i found in my consulting work with the university of utah
[00:05:36] So I created these four end to end courses and worked with a great team there. We made these super cool videos. And I was training instructors. I was doing psychometric analysis. I was. Writing dozens of business case studies. And it was a huge rush. Just keeping a week ahead of the business students was probably the most exciting part.
[00:06:03] Also I did some foundational design work that led to. The David Eccles school of business first online MBA program. So that was pretty cool as well.
[00:06:16] And after I got that rolling , and it was like, okay, this is designed. you can take it , I was offered a role on a management consulting team. And at that point, I still didn't feel like I really knew what I was doing. So I considered this another educational experience.
[00:06:34] And lots of other small coaching and consulting gigs. at that point was really good to see across industries. To kind of look through the window, so to speak into these organizations, help them tweak and improve. Training their leadership , adding structure to their processes, some organizational development, a lot of communications management.
[00:06:59] it was a lot of fun. , getting a large cross section of work across industries, across organizations , . So that was really fun. And at the same time, I gradually developed this desire to be more a part of a permanent team. I wanted to learn about an organization from the inside. What did it feel like to be an employee? What did it feel like to work across departments?
[00:07:30] What did it feel like to design solutions for an organization that I knew because I was a part of it ? I wanted that experience. And that's when I met Evan Pincus. Which I'll tell you about in the next episode.
[00:07:47] I'm Tyler Small, and this is hacking emotional intelligence .