My own career path started with graphic design, not because I have a design degree (I have an English degree with a minor in Information Technology Studies), but because I am an artist on the side and taught myself Illustrator, Photoshop and basic HTML and CSS in order to make digital art and promote myself online. After graduating into the Great Recession of 2008, I quickly discovered few people were looking for English majors for anything, but that my more graphic and technical skills were in demand. Since I didn’t have a specialization in graphic design, the pay for my first gig was very low, but beggars can’t be choosers.

That first gig was enough to build the experience and portfolio needed for my first corporate front-end web developer job. This was still pre-smartphone era so the complexities involved in responsive design weren’t really present, but all the same my job was just keeping a pulse on web trends and absorbing any online tutorials I could to learn new things and keep my skills fresh.

For better or worse, I’m rather fearless in voicing my opinions in meetings, and was quickly recognized as someone keeping on top of web trends and coming up with new ideas and strategies for our web sites, rather than just being the passive designer I was hired to be. I got promoted to a sort of junior PM position out of this, which was the springboard needed to transition to become a Business Analyst (where, somewhat ironically, my English major + Information Technology Studies minor finally came into full play!).

My whole career was founded out of recognizing gaps that I was capable of filling, either through skills I had already learned or googling among the thousands of free tutorials to quickly upskill. As technology has advanced, doing such free upskilling has become a little more difficult (I’ll be starting paid online classes in September to fill in my gap in responsive web and HTML5 knowledge, among a few other things), but the payoffs are still pretty obvious. I now have a well-rounded resume covering design, wireframing, drafting journey maps, creating spec sheets, consulting, project management and more. I am trying to specialize in UX a bit more (per my upcoming paid classes), but it’s still great to have all those other skills and experiences in my back pocket.

I think the Great Recession taught a lot of us to learn to be versatile, and to become versatile as quickly as possible and make our versatility recognizable to as many people as possible.