Everyone ends up where they are because of their distinctive set of circumstances, experiences, and environments. When I started at Fusion six months ago, I was very excited to meet my fellow teammates and understand how they landed here. As part of the onboarding process, we are encouraged to set up 1:1s with everyone to get to know each other better. We would trade walkthroughs of our career journeys, and I realized that very few of us shared a similar backstory. Someone worked in recruiting, someone taught middle schoolers, someone skated for Disney on Ice, someone designed surgical instruments as an engineer, and someone started out in journalism.
My own professional backstory began at an advertising agency in the world of pharmaceuticals. I was a copywriter, and my days were full of very specific processes, constructs, jargon, and acronyms that mean nothing to folks outside the industry. As I grew deeper into that role and advanced, I gained clarity on the direction I wanted to be heading. I finally took the scary leap of making a career change, dipped into my savings to enroll in a UX bootcamp, and now here we are! Back to square one.
But it’s not really square one.
In my current role as a product experience designer, I’ve shed quite a bit of my previous life. I’ve focused on absorbing as much of the very specific processes, constructs, jargon, and acronyms here as possible. Yet, in all the projects I’ve touched, my past experience has always, consciously and subconsciously, weaved its way into the fabric of my work. From how I prep for co-leading design thinking workshops to suggesting copy content for a wireframe to the kinds of feedback I provide for miscellaneous deliverables — nothing happens in isolation.
If I open a slide deck, the (guiding, not ghostly) voices of former managers and colleagues echo in my head and probe, “What’s the story flow? What sections of this slide are grabbing attention? What is the call to action?” For any piece of short-form or long-form writing, I hear, “What are the main ideas? Is the level of detail appropriate here? Does everything feel cohesive?” I got the opportunity to give Fusion a quick download on copywriting basics during “Demo Thursday,” a weekly hour dedicated to spreading knowledge about anything and everything. My teammates were just as welcoming and enthusiastic to learn from me as I was learning from them.
The value of people’s backstories extends beyond hard skills.
I didn’t face many challenges with my career switch. Copywriting and user experience design are typically considered adjacent functions — when job searching, I had an easier time crafting a compelling story for why my skills could neatly translate over. But everyone’s past experiences are always relevant. Sure, maybe there are pre-requisite hard skills to tackle, but we’re missing out if we gloss over backstories that lean further away from the responsibilities of our roles.
My teammates with “unrelated” backgrounds bring wisdom from working with all sorts of people solving all sorts of problems. Someone gave me advice on embracing and navigating silence while leading a workshop, someone showed us a system for mastering foreign languages and other learning endeavors, someone got me pondering over the concept of emotional resilience, and many people have introduced lightbulb moments that reframe what I thought I already knew.
Collective wisdom elevates our work.
In our professional journeys, we might gravitate towards a particular context because we share similar enough broader values and goals. However, we diverge on what we draw from to inform our internal dialogues, mindsets, and perspectives as we engage in our day-to-day work. This leads to an abundance of ways in which we harness our imagination, critical thinking, and relationship-building skills.
And that is how we generate a surplus of rich ideas and deep connections.
A Fusion publication. We are employees of UHG and these views are our own and not those of the company nor its affiliates.
