13: 2020 Retrospective

Heidi Kirby  0:06  
Hello friends and welcome to the BLOC, the Building Learning and Organizational Culture podcast. I'm your host Heidi Kirby. I usually ask my guests to tell me a little bit about themselves and their career path at the beginning of each episode. Well, on today's solo episode, I give you a little bit about my career path and career journey, which leads into me just reflecting on 2020 as a whole, both personally and professionally, and sharing what I think is a super fun and great resource to help you reflect on your year as well. So I hope you enjoy this 2020 retrospective after a brief message from our sponsor, Verasana.

Verasana Narrator  0:51  
Your business needs a better way to train, the better that your team needs is training that leads to performance. Verasana is interactive and repeatable. So your employees can return to lessons as many times as they need to. And we optimize the training, so they, and you can, review their progress. The power of mobile makes it possible. Our team has decades of experience and expertise. We do it because we've been where you are. Verasana, the better way to learn.

Heidi Kirby  1:20  
So in today's episode, I just want to take a little time to do a retrospective. 2020 was a big challenge for me professionally... personally, as I'm sure it has been for many of you as well. I want to take this time to kind of explain a little bit about my career journey because mostly you get to hear from my guests. But I wanted to give a little bit of my background story as well. My career started when I graduated college with an English degree in the middle of the 2009 recession. I couldn't find a job in writing and editing like I had wanted to and ended up working retail and living at home with my parents. At that point, someone said to me, "Heidi, if you get your master's, you can teach college." And I thought, "that sounds like fun. I loved all my college English professors." So I went back to school and got my master's in English. And the month after I graduated,  I landed my first job teaching college English. And over the next five years, I taught as an adjunct English professor at for-profit colleges, private colleges, and community colleges in Northeast Ohio - and even at an online college. My schedule was work two schools Mondaym Wednesday - work at different two schools Tuesday, Thursday, have a Thursday night class, maybe a Saturday morning class - my schedule was all over the place, right? And if you've done any adjuncting, I'm sure you're familiar with that. During this time, I also went back and got a second Master's in education because I just wanted to be the best professor I could be. And I didn't really understand kind of the theoretical foundations of instruction and teaching. And I really wanted some extra, some extra oomph to be a better professor. And at that point, I really had thought that my career track was going to be full time professor. But as many of you who've adjuncted also know, it's very difficult to get into the full-time, especially tenure-track, professor roles. In 2016, I became pregnant with my son. And I realized that this whole adjunct schedule was not going to work out for me - night classes, weekend classes, being home in the daytime but paying for childcare, seemed like a waste of money and seemed like a schedule I really didn't want with a little one. So I started applying for PhD programs in instructional design because I had learned about instructional design as a field, through my education graduate degree, and thought maybe this is where I want to end up. So when my son was four months old, I started my PhD journey in Instructional Design and Technology at Old Dominion University.

Crazy, right? To have a four month old and start a Ph.D. program. But if you've met some of the people in my program, they've got multiple kids - more power to you! I don't know how you do it. I thought it was hard with one kid. But I also figured if I don't enroll in a Ph.D program now, while my son is young, I may never get that opportunity while he gets older and starts getting into sports and you know, has his own things to do. So after about a semester of classes, I realized that I'd been designing instruction for about five years. As an instructor of English. If you've taught college, you know, you get handed a syllabus and a textbook and told "go wild!" Taking those initial instructional design courses helped me to be able to use the jargon, the language of instructional design to explain what I had already done. 

So I dialed back my classes in the summer. And between spending time with my young son, you know, I'd take my son to the park - he'd be sleeping in the stroller while I'm connecting with people on LinkedIn, we'd be playing in his room, and I'd have a webinar or podcast on in the background to learn more. He'd be you know, taking a nap, and I'd be reading for my PhD program or trying to add to my portfolio and build my skill set. And in the fall, I was able to land my first instructional design job with NASA. I mean, it's a cool brag factor to say that you work for NASA. But I also like to just tell people that that was my first instructional design job to be an inspiration that, yeah, I was a college professor, and then I worked for NASA, it can be done, you can make the transition into instructional design. Don't let anybody tell you as an educator that you can't, because I remember to this very day, an interview that I went on for my first instructional design job, where someone sat across from me, and literally said to me, this, this was a future coworker, not the hiring manager, and said, "You know, I really hate when the hiring manager brings in teachers to be interviewed, because they don't know what they're doing" - to my face, in an interview said that, to me, a teacher, a professor. And so as much as the hiring manager seemed excited about having me there, I wasn't so excited about my future team. And so I was happy that it ended up working out with NASA instead. But I'm sure that many of you who are teachers have gone through, you know, something similar with making your transition into instructional design. So few years ago, I made the switch, got into a full time instructional design role, worked for NASA for about a year, worked for a large health insurance company in Cleveland for about six months, and then worked for a tire distribution company in Cleveland for about a year. 

In April of this year, I was laid off due to COVID - my position was eliminated. I spent six weeks looking for a new job - filed for unemployment. And actually, that night, I updated my resume. I'm all about kind of taking that time to feel your feelings. So yeah, I totally took a couple days to just like eat junk food and binge Netflix, but at the same time, I had like my laptop open and was updating my resume and applying for jobs, too. Because the only way to kind of take your mind off of that failure, for mem was to put all my effort into finding something new. I kept this massive Google spreadsheet of all the places I applied to. And I ended up applying to 83 different instructional design related positions and got ghosted by most of them. And then interviewed for, I think, approximately seven different positions. What's funny enough is that I found this position for a company I'd never heard of called Verasana. So I looked up this company on LinkedIn, and there was only one employee, and it was the CEO. And so I messaged him on LinkedIn at 10:30 on a Wednesday night, because I was constantly on the hunt for a new job. And he messaged me back and asked if I had time to talk the next morning, the rest is pretty much history.

And that's how I got started at my role with the startup Verasana and ended up managing their instructional design function, which has proved to be such a wonderful experience. This podcast has come from that experience. But all that to say that 2020 was really a year of some pretty stark disappointments for me. But things started to really turn around and I feel that I was determined to end 2020 on a positive note. Absolutely determined - determined to see failure as an opportunity to learn - determined to give myself space to feel the failure. I think that that's a really important one. Because a lot of times we just kind of like, we either give ourselves a little bit too long, where like, there's a fine line between like, allowing yourself to feel your feelings and like wallowing and self pity, right? 

I think that 2020 has been, for a lot of people a time to really get in touch with what mental health means to them. And I think that that's important, because for everybody, it's a little bit different. My mental health regimen is probably different than yours. And that's fine. But I think that it's important to honor and respect our mental health. And on that note of mental health, I really want to share a resource. I'll share it in the show notes. But it's from YearCompass.com And it's a workbook called The Year Ahead. And I filled this out with my husband last year - I filled it filled it out alone, and then I filled it out with him. And it's a reflection on the year prior. And then an intentional goal setting for the year to come where you pick a word for the year ahead, and a wish for the year ahead. Last year, my word that I chose at the end of 2019 was alacrity. Alacrity is a brisk and cheerful readiness, by definition. And synonyms include eagerness, willingness and readiness. I don't know if anyone could have picked a worse word (laughs). I don't know if anyone could have been ready for what was to come in 2020. But I am super happy looking back on this. And I really encourage you guys to check it out, and see if it's something that resonates with you. Now looking back on it, I'm really glad that I did it. And I would encourage you guys definitely to do it as well, and learned a lot of lessons in 2020, maybe more than I had anticipated, possibly more than I was willing to learn. 

But from starting the job search over again, I learned a lot about the field of instructional design, I've learned a lot about my fellow job seekers. And it's really been important for me to now help those who are transitioning into instructional design and help those who want to gain more knowledge in the field in different ways. I hope I can continue to contribute and continue to grow my network. Because I've had a great time connecting with all these people I've never met before on LinkedIn. And it's just been a really great experience to share knowledge, share links, share research, cheer each other on help each other find jobs. It's been a great, great latter half of the year. Coming to terms with the new normal. And having you know, I am the only instructional designer at my organization. But I feel like I have coworkers. Because of all the different connections that I have on LinkedIn and all the people I talk to daily or communicate with daily. It feels great. It feels I feel very much supported. Thank you to the LinkedIn community and network. 

I also want to give a huge shout out to everyone who took the time to come on my show this year. Eamonn, Luke, Latoya, Jeremy, Cara, Holly, Veronica, Alex, Leslie, Jen - you all have been wonderful. And I can't thank you enough, especially those of you who didn't previously know me, for taking a chance and coming and talking to me about what we love to do. I think it has made such a difference. And I think I've wanted to do a podcast for a few years. So I can't thank you guys enough for helping me realize that dream. I'm hoping that this episode will inspire you to reflect on your past year and inspire you to reflect on your successes, but also your failures and what you've learned from them. I am looking forward to lots more episodes in 2021. So I hope you'll join me. 

Thanks again for joining me on the BLOC. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and review us on your favorite podcast platform. I hope you'll tune in again soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai