This gal. 😎
I never really expected the job to be a long term thing but it sucks because I liked that job and needed a bit more time to recover financially and emotionally than uhh 6 months. It's also obviously unexpected.
We had a team of ~50 and they cut 11 people from a specialized subteam in February. A bunch of people freaked out and they were like "we're making intentionally deep and conservative cuts to avoid having to do this again anytime soon."
And that came alongside a "numbers-driven" VP stepping in over our team (a compliance team), and when I asked her "ok we have soft skills that don't provide numbers. How do you expect us as a team prove numerical value to you?" and she said "Do more interviews."
Fast forward literally less than 30 days and they cut the team down to 8 people.
Gonna list some professional stuff below the break.
I've intentionally worded a lot of this casually for ease, and I can easily provide copy for business-sonas.
Shares greatly appreciated.
My prospects are a jumbled mess right now, but I'm mostly marketable in things like communications and organization stuff but also have recent compliance, writing, editing, and UX stuff I'm looking to leverage.
I studied English composition and literature in college, getting a BA with a minor in Communications and International Endorsement (meaning I did a study abroad, also got a foreign language AA and focused my studies in non-American-centric courses). I took several education and psychology courses to start off, too, since I was planning to go into teaching, but pivoted into hopefully better-paying and better-organized work.
I worked for 7.5 years at a SaaS startup that was bought out by one of the largest publishing companies in the US. I worked sort of as a translator between the clients (teachers and school administrators) and our software team for fixes, new features, etc. I also did a ton of other stuff on the side, since we were a small team. Everybody had a hand in everything. I was laid off from that last July.
While I was working that job, I was looking to change into careers I could enjoy that weren't essentially software scrum hell, so I took some classes in UX Research and Design. I did a major case study and 8 week internship for that.
While looking for UX jobs, a friend told me about his job that was hiring at a major staffing agency where we would interview people with flagged background checks to determine their likelihood of reoffending. We worked with several levels of regulation and talked with people about a lot of legal jargon as well as working through ethics, carceral punishment, cops, justice, addiction, and a lot of really interesting and difficult stuff! It was a lot of risk analysis and involved hard decisions and hard conversations, but at its core, I was helping advocate for people with nowhere to work because of a criminal background.
Like I said above, I really liked the job, but so it goes.
You can message me here or look me up on LinkedIn or whatever.
I'm Casey Crook and my email is caseycrook92@gmail.com
Thanks for reading ❤️