Career Success Story: Amanda de Boer
How one Pathstream student used the Facebook Digital Marketing Program to transition from a dental hygiene career to a marketing specialist role for one of the world’s largest food brands
Amanda de Boer had been a dental hygienist for over 10 years. She was good at her job, but wanted to try something new — ideally in a remote, flexible work environment. She discovered the Facebook Digital Marketing program offered through Central Piedmont Community College and was immediately intrigued: the program looked like a way to change careers on an accelerated timeline.
Her plans worked out. A month after graduating from the program, Amanda landed two freelance marketing roles with local companies. “I started off in a totally different career field and the fact that I was able to have interest from two different companies immediately after finishing and have job opportunities pop up has been really exciting,” Amanda says.
She found her first job opportunity directly as a result of a project in the course. A fellow classmate, Jenny Melick, also happened to be the founder of a local cosmetics company called Roses and Azalea specializing in clean beauty products. The business was growing rapidly and Jenny enlisted Amanda to help with a class project to design Facebook Ads for the business. The partnership worked so well that Jenny contacted Amanda a month after the program ended and offered her a job. Amanda took over social media, email marketing, and blog writing for the business. “We kept testing things out and adding more and more responsibilities,” she said. By hiring Amanda, Jenny was able to focus on expanding other parts of the business. “She had confidence in handing things over to me because she knew exactly what I learned in the courses,” Amanda says.
In addition to her work at Roses and Azalea, Amanda was hired to support content marketing for a local law firm. In her interviews with the firm she was able to cite all of the new skills she had gained and projects she had completed as part of the Facebook Digital Marketing program.
After freelancing for a few months, Amanda had built a portfolio of digital marketing projects she was proud of and began to apply to jobs. In December 2020 she was hired as a Marketing Specialist at Compass Group, the largest contract foodservice company in the world. In this role, she assists with marketing, advertising and promotional activities across the business. “The VP of Compass Group that I talked to loved my non-traditional path and that I wasn’t a cookie cutter candidate,” Amanda says, “I never could have gotten to this point without the Pathstream program.”
“It was a complete career switch for me,” she continues, “I wanted to rebrand myself. After ten years of dentistry work, your neck and back start to hurt! I knew I didn’t want to do that forever. I’ve been really pleased that in the time of COVID I’ve been able to have a whole career change and get my foot in the door at three different companies. I wouldn’t have been able to do that without the Facebook Digital Marketing program through Pathstream and Central Piedmont Community College.”
