Career chats: Zigzag explorers and career switchers
About this video
Several people describe zigzag, non-linear careers. They opened doors that appeared in front of them, taught themselves new fields, quit jobs to try something new, and changed industries after events like a pandemic and a banking crisis, finding that winding routes can turn out well.
You'll be able to
- explain what a zigzag or non-linear career path is.
- give an example of a speaker who switched fields.
- explain why a winding path can still be positive.
Key words
- non-traditional
- Different from the usual or expected way of doing something.
- self-taught
- Having learned a skill on your own instead of through formal classes.
- curriculum
- The plan of lessons and topics that students learn in a course.
- linear
- Going in a straight line, one step directly after another.
Transcript
(upbeat music) - My path is a little convoluted and it's very, it's not the straight path. I am the non-traditional student and probably the non-traditional employee, worker or whatever you wanna call it.
- But again, I believed in opening doors that were in front of me, not just trying to go straight and muscle my way through a straight path to get from A to B. And so in the end, that kind of winding route ended up to be really positive thing for my life.
- And so it was through my students and one nonprofit that I worked for that I started getting into computer science. And so I'm completely self-taught in that field. And then currently work as a curriculum development manager at code.org, where I developed the curriculum.
- Literally two weeks before I was supposed to start the job, I quit Amazon, moved to ShapeShift as a part-time writer in the marketing department, and then roll that way.
- The federal government came in and took over my bank. So I went from a global pandemic to a banking crisis, and now I'm in the third manifestation of my career, which is its human resources sales, which seems kind of like not a logical or linear pathway.
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